Dreaming of the Albatross with its mad red eyes.

[truepenny]

I keep having this dream.


Wherein I'm working for my Ph.D., but somehow I'm also in my last year of high school and taking a math class (last night it was two math classes). Since, you must understand, I was a hardcore math geek in high school (a piece of identity which sloughed off my first semester of college, and let's not tell that story here), these classes are always multi-variable calculus or beyond. And it's the usual anxiety-dream thing, where I can't remember to go to class, and I'm not doing the homework, and I don't understand the concepts, and I'm failing. Obviously failing. Failing like the safety precautions at Three Mile Island.

It's never clear, in these dreams, that failing this math class will prevent me from getting my Ph.D. But it will, and utterly, wreck my GPA, which in RL I put to bed at a perfect 4.0 five years ago. I keep trying to tell myself, in the dream, that my GPA doesn't matter, that no one's going to care, but it doesn't help because *I* care. And I can't figure out how I can be so stupid as to forget to go to class. Because it's that sort of dream where you can see everything that's stupid and wrong-headed about its premises, but you can't get to that saving moment of realizing, Hey! I'm dreaming!

And when I wake up, I inevitably lie there for a second in a state of dread and frustration before I remember that I don't have to remember to go to class in the morning, and there isn't homework I should have done last night. The sense of relief is lovely, but I'm falling afoul of the law of diminishing returns: the relief is no longer enough to make up for having that damn dream AGAIN.


I've got to get this Albatross out of my hair.

---

ANYA: For a thousand years I wielded the powers of the Wish. I brought ruin to the heads of unfaithful men. I brought forth destruction and chaos for the pleasure of the lower beings. I was feared and worshipped across the mortal globe. And now I'm stuck at Sunnydale High. Mortal. A child. And I'm flunking math.
--Joss Whedon, "Doppelgängland," Buffy the Vampire Slayer 3.16

Comments

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

One of my standard anxiety dreams is that I'm flunking a science or calculus class because I just never showed up all semester and forgot to officially drop and/or show up for the final, and now I'm not going to graduate from college. You would think that since I'm no longer in an academic environment, my anxiety dreams would change, but no. (Okay -- I also recently had an anxiety dream about work, but the whole "Academic Failure! Too Late! All My Fault!" one persists. And the one about missing planes.)

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

Been there, done that. Still have the t-shirt.

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Oh, I have the missing planes one a lot. Usually for transpacific flights. Oy.

I don't have any bad academic dreams, probably because I'm still in grad school and thisclose to resigning, so waking life is bad enough there. ;p

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I have this similar one where I keep inadvertently missing or forgetting classes, usually, for some reason, in French: possibly representing, as well as generalised anxiety, a further layer about my extremely poor abilities in foreign languages.

I never actually miss the plane: I'm striving against all sorts of obstacles - trying to pack things into inadequate suitcases, having to go back for something essential, inability to find a taxi, having not left enough time for the journey to the airport... but not the actual moment of seeing it fly away without me. On a less glamorous and intercontinental transport level, I also have anxiety dreams about waiting for buses.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

The "I'm back being fifteen stuck in school and all the wonders of my adult life since then have been a dream" dream is one I still get from time to time; I think on balance the relief of waking up from that outweighs the bad feeling of being in it.

The other one I get occasionally is the one where I am anywhere from fifteen to twenty and have sat a relatively easy exam in one of my strong subjects, finished a little ahead of time, handed it in, and am informed after the end of it that I had only been given half the paper. I hate that.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Last night, I had the Teaching Dream again, and the relief upon waking up from that continues to be like finding an oasis just before one perishes of thirst in the middle of the Sahara.

So I am forced to the conclusion that the Failing Math Dream doesn't bug me enough for the full pay-off on waking. It just bugs me enough to make a bad dream out of.

We are not amused.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

[shudder. shudder.] Oddly, I nearly had a real-life anxiety attack over math this week when a report kept coming out wrong. Like, thoughts scattering like blown leaves, heart speeding up--I had to put it aside and come back to it later. I think that kind of "I'm not smart enough!" thing persists, especially when one cares about the results of one's academic pursuits.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

My mother and I both confessed at a family dinner to having "I forgot to go to class!" anxiety/panic dreams, even though I'd been out of college several years and my mother for close to thirty (at the time). My grandfather, a former college professor, nodded understandingly and said that *he* had anxiety dreams about grading mountains of papers and not getting them back to his students on time, even though he'd been retired for close to twenty years...AND he still had "I forgot to go to class!" dreams even though he graduated in the 1930s.

We all agreed that the bliss of waking up and finding that you are not, in fact, late for a nonexistent class is ineffable.