I'm happy to be invited onto this mysterious and wonderful blog as a guest-dreamer. I had a dream the other night that was a more intense version of the usual exam-anxiety dream, a hold-over in most of us from school days. In this dream, I had an entire project - not just an exam or paper - due at the end of semester, which was the next day. I raced around trying to figure out what the project was, and where I was supposed to deliver it. I rooted around in the campus bookstore for the course's textbook, but I had no idea what the course was, so I didn't have a prayer of finding it.
Finally, I ran across a teacher I'd had in real-life grad school over twenty years ago. I told him about my dilemma, and said if he'd tell me what the course was about, I could write an essay. Would that do?
"An essay!" he roared, as if it was the most absurd, paltry thing he'd ever heard of.
Intense shame, guilt, and anxiety woke me up, and I realized again that the only good of these dreams is the relief, on waking, that we're no longer in school.
It was only on talking over this dream a few days later with W., my host on this blog, that I realized I'd watched a Seinfeld episode the evening before this dream, where George Costanza is given a "big project" by his boss, but George gets shut out of the men's room where his boss describes the project. When the boss emerges, George is afraid to own up to not hearing a word and asking his boss to repeat it, so he has to run around trying to eavesdrop on different departments to find out what the "big project" is, and what he's supposed to be doing.
George's anxiety resonated so strongly with me, that it brought on this dream. And that's why I've related it here, as an example of my experience of dreams being triggered by something in my waking life the evening or day before I have them. I bring my own details to the dream, like the teacher from my past, but the central idea of the dream - the anxiety over not being prepared for final course requirements - comes from some identifiable trigger in waking life the day before the dream.
