School Dreams
A 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.
COMMENTS
9 thoughts on “School Dreams”
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Braden
Happy birthday!
Jon Boy
Right back atcha.
brozy
Happy birthday, Jon Boy.
Braden
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dkw
I still have that dream occaisionally and I’ve been out of highschool for 16 years. Sometimes I even know that in the dream, but think I’m not going to be able to graduate college or get my master’s because the administration will find out that I never completed that calculus (or english, or whichever it is in that night’s dream) class.
Sometimes when I wake up I have to look at my diploma and degrees to remind myself that they are done and there is nothing left I need to wrap up to get them.
davisa
Happy Birthday, Unusually Strong Boy! Or was it Impeccably Strong Boy? Unexplainably Stong Boy? I can’t remember anymore! Nor did I remember we had the same birthday either, so I am glad you reminded me! Hope you had a good one, and thanks for checking our blog. Do you want me to add you to our friends’ sites list?
Jon Boy
Freakishly Strong Boy! How could you forget? Or just Freakish for short, of course.
Sure, go ahead and add me. It’s about time I updated my own links.
William Morris
I too still regularly have those dreams — the misplaced locker or forgotten locker combination, the missing or weird gym clothes, the realization that you haven’t been to class all semester and the final is the next day.
I also have the losing teeth in very gnarly ways dream.
And I also have one that I bet is somewhat ubiquituous, but I have never heard of anyone else having it: I wore contacts (gas-permeable lenses) all through high school and every once in a while I’ll have a dream where there are issues with my contacts — either there are many of them of many sizes and I can’t find the right ones, or there are a bunch of them floating in water and I go to pick one up and it tears, or — the worst one — there are more than one in my eye and I can’t get them out. It’s quite freaky.
I wonder what recurring dreams people had in the days before formal education. You left the gate open and the pigs got out? You go to harvest the turnips and when you pull up them up they disintegrate? I’m not being snide here, I truly wonder.
Divine Miss A
I have dreams like that still too, only now I’m the TEACHER. It’s still just as freaky and still just as frightening.