I’ve written before about my anxiety dreams.  Last night I had a doozy.
I dreamt that I suddenly realized that I was enrolled in college and that my life had become so complicated that I had simply forgotten all about attending classes for some weeks.  I remember thinking that there was no way that I could go back and make up the work I had missed, and that I had no good reason for a late drop, and that I didn’t want all those W’s on my transcript.  I was making plans to ask all the professors for incompletes and wondering how I would get all that work done.
Then it got worse.  I remembered that I was simultaneously enrolled in high school.  I couldn’t recall why this had been necessary, but there was some reason for it.  I couldn’t remember having attended any of my classes.  I knew I had gotten books and a locker, and I was embarrassed thinking that I was going to have to go to the office and ask where my locker was located and what its combination was, and I was wondering whether I would be able to convince them to forget the whole thing and not mess up my 4.0 average from when I was last there.
I have variations on this dream all the time, and what was particularly evil about last night’s version was that I thought to myself, “This is just like those dreams I always have, only this time it’s real!”
My high school anxiety dream is the most frequent and the worst, but I have another one that’s about Christmas, where I haven’t cooked any food or bought any presents or put up any decorations and it’s the day before Christmas.   Then there’s the driving dream, when I’m on some awful interstate that steep and twisty like a roller coaster, and I don’t know where I am or how to get off of it.  And there are others.
Anyway, I was SO relieved to wake up this morning.  I truly believe that, “It was only a dream,” in one of the most beautiful phrases in the language.
What about you?  Do you have any recurring dreams?  Do you know what they mean?