Still my scariest dream

The Off-Season

This morning I woke up from a dream that I was driving to school1 and suddenly realized that I had forgotten my lunchbox at home. Apparently that was enough of a jolt to wake me up.2

Which got me to thinking on the topic of recurring dreams — or rather, one in particular that still dogs me every now and then. Every time I mention this one around friends — particularly, friends in my approximate age group that are working jobs and are long done with school — invariably a bunch of them chime in with “OMG I GET THAT ONE TOO!”

It goes something like this:

I’m back in college, and it’s Final Exam week. (Both of those are scary enough, in and of themselves, no?) The kicker is: I realize I have a final exam THAT DAY for a class that I have somehow NEVER ATTENDED.

Yes. As in, “Uh I don’t remember having this class on my schedule EVER but WTF I have a final exam in it TODAY?!?”3

Feelings of intense anxiety ensue, basically it’s the end of my world, and when I finally wake up in a cold sweat, it feels like I’ve narrowly escaped an Alfred Hitchcock sketch.

final-exam-dream-meme

Like, what the heck IS that?4 I suppose you could try psycho-analyzing it to say maybe we’re anxious about being unprepared for the next stage of our lives? Or that we feel like our lives are moving too fast? Or that maybe we’re forgetting something really important? Sigh.5 6

Interestingly, a friend pointed out that a bunch of the folks in our circle of friends who seem to share in this recurring dream are graduates of the College of Engineering at The University of Texas (at Austin).

Which — if you’ve been there — would actually explain a lot. :)

  1. given that it’s my 5th day of summer vacay, this immediately classifies it as a nightmare [↩]
  2. Hashtag, teacher problems. [↩]
  3. A couple of variations on the same theme that I’ve had: I have a final exam (as a student) and for some reason, I can’t find the classroom that I’m supposed to go to… or it’s the first day of school (as a teacher) and I can’t figure out which bus route to take to school. Yes, bus route. I can’t explain it either. [↩]
  4. And according to Reddit, me and my friends are not nearly the only ones… [↩]
  5. Okay, so a quick Google search says this has something to do with midlife career change anxiety. Hmmmm. [↩]
  6. Here’s another link that — more or less — nails it. [↩]
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