"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - unam.

I decided there must be an "interpretation department." When you are actually
looking at something ­­ a man, a lamp, or a wall ­­ you don't just see blotches of color.
Something tells you what it is; it has to be interpreted. When you're dreaming, this
interpretation department is still operating, but it's all slopped up. It's telling you that
you're seeing a human hair in the greatest detail, when it isn't true. It's interpreting the
random junk entering the brain as a clear image.
One other thing about dreams. I had a friend named Deutsch, whose wife was
from a family of psychoanalysts in Vienna. One evening, during a long discussion about
dreams, he told me that dreams have significance: there are symbols in dreams that can
be interpreted psychoanalytically. I didn't believe most of this stuff, but that night I had
an interesting dream: We're playing a game on a billiard table with three balls ­­ a white
ball, a green ball, and a gray ball ­­ and the name of the game is "titsies." There was
something about trying to get the balls into the pocket: the white ball and the green ball
are easy to sink into the pocket, but the gray one, I can't get to it.
I wake up, and the dream is very easy to interpret: the name of the game gives it
away, of course ­­ them's girls! The white ball was easy to figure out, because I was
going out, sneakily, with a married woman who worked at the time as a cashier in a
cafeteria and wore a white uniform. The green one was also easy, because I had gone out
about two nights before to a drive­in movie with a girl in a green dress. But the gray one ­
­ what the hell was the gray one? I knew it had to be somebody; I felt it. It's like when
you're trying to remember a name, and it's on the tip of your tongue, but you can't get it.
It took me half a day before I remembered that I had said goodbye to a girl I liked
very much, who had gone to Italy about two or three months before. She was a very nice
girl, and I had decided that when she came back I was going to see her again. I don't
know if she wore a gray suit, but it was perfectly clear, as soon as I thought of her, that
she was the gray one.
I went back to my friend Deutsch, and I told him he must be right ­­ there is
something to analyzing dreams. But when he heard about my interesting dream, he said,
"No, that one was too perfect ­­ too cut and dried. Usually you have to do a bit more
analysis."
The Chief Research Chemist of the Metaplast Corporation
After I finished at MIT I wanted to get a summer job. I had applied two or three
times to the Bell Labs, and had gone out a few times to visit. Bill Shockley, who knew
me from the lab at MIT, would show me around each time, and I enjoyed those visits
terrifically, but I never got a job there.
I had letters from some of my professors to two specific companies. One was to
the Bausch and Lomb Company for tracing rays through lenses; the other was to
Electrical Testing Labs in New York. At that time nobody knew what a physicist even
was, and there weren't any positions in industry for physicists. Engineers, OK; but
physicists ­­ nobody knew how to use them. It's interesting that very soon, after the war,
it was the exact opposite: people wanted physicists everywhere. So I wasn't getting
anywhere as a physicist looking for a job late in the Depression.
About that time I met an old friend of mine on the beach at our home town of Far