How not to start a Monday morning

[truepenny]

I'm cut-tagging because this is long and bitchy and discusses both anxiety dreams and household disasters. Yeah, great morning I'm having. Not.


Last night, I had That Dream again, the one I am coming to hate with the fiery passion of ten thousand suns.

It's the dream wherein I am finishing up my last semester of school (which, please note, is ALREADY OVER), struggling to get my dissertation completed by the deadline (which, please note, I've ALREADY DONE), only somehow I have to take another course because otherwise I won't have enough credits to graduate. I finished my coursework in 1999, so honest to god hasn't the statute of limitations on that anxiety run out already?

But I have to take this course. What it is seems to vary from dream to dream. Once it was math; once it was French. Last night it seemed to be history of some sort--socioeconomic history, I think, but I don't know of where.

And because I'm also trying to finish my dissertation, I don't have time to go to class, and I don't have time to do the reading, and I basically just DO NOT HAVE TIME FOR THIS PETTY-MINDED BUREAUCRATIC CRAP.

::ahem::

So the end of the semester is approaching in the dream, and I know there's no way I'm going to get an A in this stupid class. (Which is an anxiety--and I apologize for this--because I maintained a perfect 4.0 for four years of undergrad and three years of grad coursework. My grade anxiety could eat Manhattan with Rhode Island for dessert.) The final paper is due in the next day or two, and I haven't started it. I know I can bullshit my way to a passing grade--I'm a grad student, after all--but while a passing grade will fulfill the damn requirement, it will wreck my GPA and Bad Things will happen. (No, I don't know what Bad Things, exactly. Just, you know, Bad.)

Now, in the real world, this did happen once. First semester freshman year, when I still thought I could be a math major. (Ha!) It became obvious fairly quickly that I would have understood more of the course material if the professor had been lecturing in Linear A, and I let my pride get the axe, and took the course Pass/Fail. (I passed, too, although frankly I don't know how.) So I remembered this in the dream--that I could take the course Pass/Fail, and fulfill the requirement, and not fuck my GPA over--but of course it was almost the end of the semester, and probably the Pass/Fail deadline was already past.

I came out of that dream composing pleading letters to the Dean.

Gaaaah.


So I woke up feeling (not surprisingly) rather like I'd gone ten rounds with the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, dragged out of bed, actually exercised, and went to take a shower.

In retrospect, I should have taken a bath.

We have a shower with the detachable shower-head thingy. Being only 5'4", I like it muchly and tend to use it. Today as I was putting it back up in its natural shower-head position, I leaned on it a little too hard, there was a sharp crack!, and my bathroom was suddenly re-enacting the Deluge. The bit where the shower-head attaches to the water pipe had become an ex-parrot.

Water on the ceiling, water on the walls, water in the Matisse poster we'd just gotten a new frame for, water soaking the poetry collection that has been my bath reading for the past several days. Also, one of the lightbulbs over the sink went out, but I don't know if that was consequence or coincidence. Water, water, everywhere ...

I don't like feeling like the Ancient Mariner in my personal life.

And Mirrorthaw and I will be acquiring a new shower-head this evening.

I'd go back to bed, but I'd probably just get stuck in That Dream again.

::small grumbling balrog-noises::

Comments

[eeyorerin]

I have been having my own version of That Dream lately as well, but it is getting less frequent over time. I don't know if I'm offering condolences or commiseration, but I hope that it gets less for you, too.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you. Either commiseration or condolences gratefully accepted. I just hate that damn dream.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Oh dear.

There's a bit in the Irish story of the Sons of Tuirean (pronounced Tureen, like the dish) where the sons have killed Lugh's father and Lugh finds out and Lugh tells them that the only way to atone is to do half a zillion (individually enumerated) impossible tasks, the last one of which is pretty sure to kill them if they've survived that far. They go home and tell Tuirean all this, in detail, and he shakes his head and says: "Well, that's bad, that is."

I hope your shower is easily fixable, that the poetry and the poster dries or is replaceable, and that the dream will go away and bother Frank Kermode instead.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Tuirean is reminding me irresistably of elisem's post about Minnesota-speak from a few weeks back.

Both poetry and poster appear to be fine.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

I finished my coursework in 1999, so honest to god hasn't the statute of limitations on that anxiety run out already?

I graduated in 1981. I STILL get That Dream. I once talked back to it, said "I graduated", and THE PRESIDENT OF THE COLLEGE (a much-beloved figure in my day) showed up and explained that no, I still had to finish that class.

I get this one, as well as the organizing-a-journey dream, whenever I'm not writing. Is there something in your own life that is surfacing as this dream?

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, I still get anxiety dreams about exams I had to sit in secondary school, the last of which were in 1990. [ The one I hate most is where I finish an exam slightly early, doublecheck it, hand it in, and only after leaving the room realise I got a misprinted paper with half the questions I was supposed to answer on; that can wake me in a cold sweat yet. ]

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Eep!

But you got writing done. Remember?

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Tell yourself, "The next time I have the Dream, I will drop the course." That worked for me.

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

It's always high school, for me, when it happens. And high school was
sixteen years ago now. I must have felt better about college.

It's probably a real component of the reason I've never considered
grad school.

[redbird]

Mine was, for some reason, always a test in Mrs. O'Malley's (9th grade) social studies class, clear through college. I had no particular problems with that class, teacher, or subject at the time, only in dreamspace.

[lisekit.livejournal.com]

I have a strange thing where I dream (anxiously) about forgetting dance routines six months after performance.

I also have dreams about adult dance classes not paying attention to me and not following my instructions (something that has never - yet - happened!)