School Dreams
Saturday, July 8th, 2006A few nights ago (the night of July 4, to be precise) I was having a strange dream, but it was interrupted when the phone rang (this was around 2:30). I let the answering machine get it, but apparently it was rather urgent, because the phone rang again several seconds later. Brinestone got up and answered it, and it turned out it was a wrong number (I guess the part where I said our last name on the outgoing message wasn’t enough to tip him off). She told him very tersely, “You have the wrong number. And it’s 2:30.” Her guess was that it was some guy coming home drunk from a party and needing a ride home.
But that’s really not the point of this post. The dream I was having was a particular kind of dream that I would usually have just before the school year started. I had these dreams for years, but they magically stopped once I was in college. I don’t remember the elementary-school versions very well, but the junior-high and high-school dreams usually consisted of me forgetting where my classes were, forgetting what my classes were, forgetting where my locker was, forgetting my locker combination . . . you get the point. It was all very natural pre-school-year anxiety.
The weird thing is that I’ve started having them again, or at least variations of them. I dreamed that I was going to calculus class (don’t ask me why I’m still dreaming about high school, over seven years later), but I’d missed an entire month of class. I wasn’t sure how it had happened, but I knew that I didn’t have a reasonable explanation and that I was going to be in pretty serious trouble. My high-school calculus teacher was one of my favorite teachers ever, but you really didn’t want to be on his bad side. He was a former army ranger, and he certainly wouldn’t have shown any patience or mercy for someone who had inexplicably missed a month of material.
So here I am in my dream, one of the former stars of my calculus class, coming in after a mysterious month-long absence (and forty-five minutes late to boot) to face a potentially scary teacher and make a complete fool of myself. And I’ve had this dream twice in the last month. I’m not quite sure what’s going on, but I think it’s somehow connected to worries about graduate school. I guess I need to start making some decisions about that.
