Hammer Dream (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog)

This morning, I heard my daughter stirring in the next room, and I fell back asleep, knowing I only had a few minutes before I had to start getting her ready for preschool.

In those few minutes, I had a dream.

I was showing my daughter a hammer. It had a squarish head, like a metalworker’s square hammer. It had a foam padded handle, that was decorated with a realistic-looking woodgrain pattern. I was trying to amuse my daughter by poking dents in the foam padding, pretending that I was strong enough to make the wood handle squish.

When my daughter realized the trick, I pulled off the foam sheath, revealing the real wood of the hammer under the woodgrain-printed foam covering. I did so in a dramatic fashion, expecting my daughter to laugh, which she did.

Then I noticed that the woodgrain of the hammer was actually a cheap vinyl covering, like you find on cheap office furniture (or the furniture I see all round me here in my basement study). When I peeled off some of that covering, I saw that the handle was actually made of that wood chips-and-sawdust amalgam that makes up the core of plywood.

I wondered how useful a hammer could be if its handle was made up of this stuff. But when I looked even closer, I saw that instead of wood chips, the handle was composed of intricate and detailed little decorative boxes, stacked like Russian dolls. As I watched, the boxes started unfolding, spilling out into geometric patterns like an Escher print. So much wood was involved that I couldn’t imagine how it could have all fit into the space occupied by the handle.

The last thing I remember before I woke up was how I could somehow reproduce this event for the benefit of my students.

It was only an hour or so later, after I had driven my daughter to preschool (and was helping her write a page of letters) that it finally hit me… My daughter had given me a hammer for Christmas, and duh, Hammer is the name of one of the 3D design tools I’ve been using.

Tonight if I have a dream about geometric shapes pouring out of a blender, I’ll let you know.