Flavia and Mean Something have recently blogged their dreams, so here’s my contribution:
Last night I dreamt that I was enrolled for a summer course and it was the last day of class, the day of the final exam. I was trying to make it to the exam but I couldn’t find my car in a vast, crowded parking lot. I kept walking around with an increasing anxiety, convinced that my car was somewhere, if I could just find it. I would push the buttons on my key fob to unlock the car doors and I would see the familiar flash of the lights and the click as the doors unlocked — but when I walked towards these sounds/sights, my car wouldn’t be there. To condense a wearisome episode, I finally figured out that my car — or at least, the car that would respond to my key fob — was a huge black military-style jeep, nothing like my real car. I was so confused and worried that I decided I should drive this strange vehicle even if it wasn’t my own car, because I so desperately needed to get to my exam.
By this time, I was an hour late for the exam but I finally (somehow) got to the classroom only to discover/remember that the class was being taught by my mom. But, in the dream, my mom was sometimes my mom and sometimes one of my senior colleagues who is a lot like my mom — there was some weird morphing going on between them. At any rate, I was particularly mortified to be showing up an hour late and have to answer to my mom/colleague. In my head, I concocted an elaborate excuse about my car breaking down so I wouldn’t have to admit that I hadn’t been able to find my car.
But, when I went into the classroom, all the other students were finished with the exam and they were eating snacks and joking around, like an end of the semester party. And my mom/colleague was getting ready to leave because she had to participate in some important campus ceremony, so she was distracted and didn’t really notice me. I was completely frozen, unsure how to get her attention, not wanting to admit my stupidity, but really, really desperate to take the final exam.
And then I woke up.
How’s that for a exam-anxiety + lost-in-a-parking-lot + parental-colleague-authority + back-to-school dream? My subconscious was working overtime to weld all those pieces together.
I think it’s fair to say that I’m really stressed out.
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August 9, 2008 at 4:07 pm
meansomething
Wow, you have an extremely adept subconscious. I’m impressed–and hope you have a calmer day!
August 19, 2008 at 7:47 am
profacero
I am in very deep denial about the start of school. Anxiety dreams about it from the past include:
1) all the fillings fall out of my teeth, and all the stones fall out of all my costume jewelry.
2) all the pipes burst, so that water runs everywhere except from the faucets. Even the coffeemaker sprays coffee everywhere except into the pot.
3) all the interior walls in my building at school turn transparent, so I see everyone else’s class while I teach mine, and we’re all teaching the same thing, the same way, and very fast, although we haven’t started at exactly the same moment, so we’re a fast and furious, cacophonous factory.
August 19, 2008 at 8:14 am
profacero
I forgot to say: my worst ever dream on this was a lot like yours. It was about betrayal. I dreamed that it was after midterms and nobody had told me that we were now required to also be enrolled in a full load of courses. We had in fact *been* enrolled, but I hadn’t been told so I had not been to the courses I was taking. My colleagues were all happy because they had passed their midterms and were well poised to pass the semester, and they hadn’t even told me we were enrolled. This was the only one of two that felt bad – the other bad one was about my dissertation and wasn’t as bad.
And: I wish I could remember the dream about my Ph.D. exam – it was brilliant and I remembered it for a long while. Oh, yes. It was that the exam was to have sex with the main professor and passing was having them like it, but that my main professor was another straight woman. I thought that there was no way I could pass, because there was no way I could get her to like it. Practicing on other women wouldn’t help because why should she like it, even if they did? I finally gave up and went to the exam without practicing. Her office had turned into a redwood hot tub. She had turned into a man. I said this is not fair, had I known this was the format, I could have taken this exam long ago! S/he said, and I have been telling you for some time that you are ready for this exam! Then I woke up. I decided the dream meant I would pass.
During my dissertation, though, I had a whole series of more blurry dreams. The professors were absent and I wanted to find them. They were not at the university. I searched for them in a long car trip through California, hitting all the other UC campuses and nearby towns where they might be, with no luck. I heard they might be in Santa Cruz or the Silicon Valley, but all the coffee shops were empty, or full of new students I didn’t know, who were studying other fields. In the last dream, I was out of gas and money in the northern redwoods, having decided they might have retired to Humboldt County. They weren’t there, either, so I sat down in the moss to wait. I have never figured out the meaning of this dream, or what the redwood motif is (Santa Cruz has them, too), but it wasn’t pleasant or funny, it was confusing.
Now I am not having enough entertaining dreams, and this must be my problem!
August 20, 2008 at 2:03 pm
bsgirl
Thanks for your dream stories, Profacero. I’m glad to know I’m not alone in having strange dreams spurred by academic deadlines/calendars. I always have a back-to-school nightmare … happens regularly like clockwork in the weeks before the start of each semester. This years was just particularly remarkable because of the layering of elements … and the added stress around my book.