dream journal

I was sitting in the front row at some kind of math colloquium, where a woman was describing something called "abstract pairs" of matrices. (Even in the dream, I thought this was a lousy name, as there was nothing abstract about them.) The defining property had to do with the sums of various 2x2 sub-matrices, and she demonstrated how, if this property held, any 2x2 submatrix that appeared in one quadrant of the matrices must also appear in the other three quadrants, or something like that. I asked a question to clarify: "so, if I understand this, abstract pairs are really rare, but if you've got one, you only need to know what's in one quadrant and that tells you everything?" The speaker replied "No, not quite," but before she could explain why not, a woman in the back row had a question of her own, which she introduced by saying "I was the one who replied to your paper in the Bratislava Proceedings with 'I love you!'" And I don't remember what her question was. And then I woke up.

Why I'm having dreams about a math colloquium in the first place, much less one about this particular class of matrices, I don't know....