Phone interview

I was scheduled today for a phone interview, in which I was asked a series of questions about one of our research projects at NYU.

As it happened, my jet lag and general feeling of being under the weather conspired to keep me nodding off every few seconds, drifting momentarily to sleep, throughout the conversation.

I didn’t want to stop the interview and tell the interviewer to call back another time, since we’d already rescheduled this phone meeting once before. So I just stuck it out, answering the questions as they were asked.

And here’s what’s interesting: Being in this state made no difference at all to the conversation. He asked questions, I answered them. Admittedly, they were mostly questions I’d already been asked by others, so my answers were more of a cut-and-paste job from things I’d said before than an attempt at original thought.

Other than that, being in this near narcoleptic state just made me feel calm and centered. Emotionally it felt as though my answers were coming from a dream of acting in a play – a dream play in which I knew all the lines.

At some point in the conversation I realized that there was no way for the interviewer to know that I was nodding off at the end of his longer questions. As long as I didn’t actually drop the phone and start snoring – as long as I was coming back with good answers to his questions – we were fine.

I have no idea whether I could have done anything like this if someone had been asking me really hard questions – questions to which I didn’t already know the answers.

But still, it gives me pause. Perhaps we live much of our lives this way, without quite realizing it: Answering questions we’ve answered before, in a play within a dream.