Kicking Dream Ass

Like many people, I have recurring nightmares. By the time we’ve reached adulthood, our recurring nightmares have solidified into a distinct type that usually pops up when we are at our most vulnerable. “Stress dreams.” Maybe it’s the one where you show p for school naked. Maybe it’s the one where you are looking for soemthing lost and can’t find it, or the one where your teeth start falling out.

Mine takes the form of the “unknown exam.” The dream is always the same. I’m in my last semester of college, and exams are coming up. I have an exam for a class that I don’t remember registering for. I have to make up all the work for this class or I’ll fail out of school. Sometimes, it’s even too late for that, and there’s no way to make up the course work.

I have had this dream for years. Whenever I am stressed out about something, this is the dream I have. I usually wake up in an utter panic, and sometimes it takes me a really long time to remember that I haven’t been in college in almost ten years, that I did graduate, and that my degree is in a frame downstairs in my office. Sometimes it takes me several minutes. Yes. There I am lying in bed with my husband, in Washington DC, in a house I bought with money from my career, with a puppy that I bought AFTER I bought my house at my feet, and it takes me several minutes to remember that I’m not longer a college student in a dorm room in New Haven.

I am not proud of this.

I’m not the only one who has this dream. In fact, it’s so common a recurring nightmare that people have actually written academic papers on the subject.

Indeed, success is one of the hallmarks of many people with recurrent exam nightmares, says Zadra, who wrote his doctoral thesis on the link between recurrent dreams and psychological well-being…. “What’s strange is that the negative aspect in the dream is tied to an experience in which the dreamer did well. What people should keep in mind is to make a link with their current situation. There is the same underlying message: this is just another task that I can solve or approach constructively.” This link, often a stressful situation, is known as a “retrieval clue.”

Which is interesting, especially in the context of what I’m about to tell you.

Last night, I had the dream again. Except, this time in the dream, for the first time since I started having this dream many years ago, something was different. This time, I called the professor back and told him that there was absolutely NO WAY I’d signed up for a 300-level math course, and that he must have the wrong student number down or something on his registrar packet. And then I called the registrar’s office and told them that there must be some mistake, that a 300 level math course was not required for me to complete either of my two majors and I would not have signed up for it on a whim as an elective (I hadn’t taken the pre-reqs, either), and that therefore, someone had made a coding error. I got the issue resolved. I ddn’t have to take the exam.

And then I woke up.

I have no idea what this means. All I know was that I was in such a gleeful mood when I woke up. I’d beaten the dream! For once, I’d beaten it. I didn’t need to take the exam. I didn’t need to lay quietly and remember how I’d graduated from college in 2001. I’d solved the problem in my dream. I actually laughed out loud. I woke up my husband, who wanted to know what I was laughing about.

I know why I had the stress dream. There is something going on in my life that has never left me feeling so utterly powerless.

But why did I beat this dream? Why now? Is my subconscious telling me that I’m an adult, that I’m no longer a college student, and that it’s time to put away childish things? Are my new stress dreams going to be not of a collegiate nature? Or is that just the pessimist talking?

Or is my subconscious taking one of its most cherished security blankets, the outlet for stress it has relied upon for the better part of a decade, and offering it up as a sacrifice? Here, you can have this. You can have this to show you that you are stronger than the things that are happening to you. That you can overcome them. There is a way.