(no subject)

[sanpaku_backup]

My dream before I woke up this morning was a variant of a usual one. I was in a class in high school-- somehow the classroom was on the lower floor of the South Hills Village mall, kind of where the corn dog on a stick place was (I mean that atrium of the mall was outside the classroom). The desks were kind of arranged like a maze, with mine and 3-4 other peoples' in the middle of the room, directly in front of the teacher. Casey Brennan sat next to me, and that's interesting because he sat next to me in that 9th grade English class I was describing in that recent journal entry. Nora had a big-ass crush on him but he made fun of her anyway. The thing is that Casey was, for a soccer jerk, a pretty nice guy to me. He was one of the first people who I can remember not making fun of me all the time. I remember we used to both lean out chairs back all the way and lock them under the blackboard. Very rarely did I fall. More often the teacher, Mrs. ??-- woman with the face of a pig and not much of a personality-- would yell at us to stop it. So while not a friend, Casey was not a bad guy to me.

Anyway, this wasn't that class. This was a math class, and it was some male teacher, ie not one I actually ever had. He was telling everyone that I hadn't been to class in weeks and there was no way I would be able to make up the work. I looked down at my notebook and sure enough the last entry said "10/30." And I started thinking, how could I have missed so much school? Here it's January and I missed all this school. Then I woke up.

It is a very common motif of my dreams that I have somehow forgotten to do something related to schoolwork that will be very damaging. When I was in the first year of grad school I dreamed one of my advisors was telling me I hadn't taken gym so I was in trouble. It's always the same pattern: I forgot to do something that even I couldn't actually forget to have done.

The other thing is that it was math class, and this actually almost sort of happened to me in math class. I came very close as a high school senior to getting a D in my last semester of precalc. I absolutely couldn't make myself want to learn the stuff. It was very weird since I got almost all A's in my other classes. I kept thinking I understood what he was saying but I kept failing the tests (this was stuff like rotating a torus). The day after the final, which I was sure I had bombed, I saw the teacher. He had shaved off his beard so he had a gaunt, scary appearance. I asked him what I'd gotten. He asked what I needed. I told him a 24 (out of 30) and he said, yes, I got a 26. To this day I don't know if I really did or if he was sorry for me. I was all freaked out about getting rejected from college after being accepted and all this.

I got Indian food in my belly now. Time to try to work.

Comments

[flw.livejournal.com]

I had that dream for ten years straight. It began to get amusing and somewhat lucid towards the end, which is to say that I could control it. At the end, I was like, "Yeah, whatever, this simply isn't possible. Why should I take this test? It doesn't make any sense." and the people around me were shocked. Fry had this dream on Futurama, he had missed the entire semester, and showed up for the final, naked, of course. And the subject turned out to be Egyptian Algebra! [the camera pans back to reveal a chalkboard full of hieroglyphics mixed with algebraic symbols]. That was a hoot. Perhaps you can seize control of this dream.