When I was little, my nightmares were almost always about being in the back seat of a car that was driving by itself.  I still have dreams like that occasionally, where I have to drive a car even though I’m on the passenger side/in the back seat/riding a bicycle alongside the moving car or something similarly awkward and unlikely.  As an adult, I find these dreams no longer qualify as nightmares, because they don’t scare or upset me.  They go in the same category as dreams where you can’t remember your highschool locker combination, or you find you’ve forgotten to wear pants.  (I get that one a lot, too…)  Problematic, yes, but not distressing.

I had two epic nightmares in college, in which my brother Mike and I saved the world from unspeakable evil.  In both cases the dream ended well, with us heroically defeating the 1) evil flying weasels that invaded the city or 2) evil dwarf who looked suspiciously like one of my professors.  Those dreams have become Good Stories, and I have them on my Lady or Tiger writing page.  :)

Certainly my most common bad dream as an adult has been the “all my students are zombies” dream, which I still have fairly regularly even though I have been out of the classroom for several years.  In this dream, I cannot write on the board, because none of the markers work, or I have forgotten how to write, or the marks I make scoot away like little snakes, or all of the above.  Meanwhile, my students (all my students, from the whole ten years) wander, aimlessly, round and round the room in a kind of grey mist, not paying any attention to anything I say.

Most of my dreams, whether good or bad, focus on people I know.  During an anxious time, I dreamed that Paul was going swimming in a lake with an 18 foot alligator, that baby Xak dropped his cell phone in a pond and didn’t ask for help fixing it because he was afraid of getting in trouble, and that lil’ Emily smoked a cigarette.  But I don’t usually have bad dreams at all.

I often have dreams that involve laundry, or I dream about specific items of clothing I used to own.  Sometimes I make up songs in my dream.  And then there was the dream about covering a cat in pancake batter…  Can’t really explain that one…

Last night I had a horrible dream, and it was completely unlike my usual dreams, good or bad.  I dreamed that Madeline Grumet (a professor I admire) sent me an email dismissing me from auditing her class.  It simply said, “Sorry, dear.  Education costs money.  Perhaps another time…”  Indeed, because I have not paid tuition, I am only “sort-of” a student.  But in my dream, it transpired that somehow I had not paid my dues in some larger sense, and I owed the government a great deal of money – more than I could repay in many years.  And it also seemed I was only “sort-of” human, and not properly a person at all.  Since I owed so much money and since I was not an actual person, the court had decided to put me “down,” as you might do with a badly wounded animal.  My execution was scheduled in a week, and since I was not a person, there was really no way to appeal.

There were no other people in my dream – at one point I saw my parents, but they already had another daughter who was an actual person, and they couldn’t hear me.  All the people who usually appear in my dreams – Paul, my friends, my family,  lil’ Emily and the other people I love – none of them were there.

I was going through my clothes, and dreamed a whole bunch of dresses in detail: they were all wedding dresses, actually, but in my dream they were just pretty things I hadn’t had a chance to wear.  I was trying to choose which one I’d be buried in, and I was wondering if, dead, I might be squeezed into a dress that was a little too small, or if perhaps the tint of the lace on this one might make me look too green.  I picked one out, and then started packing up my things so they wouldn’t be in everybody’s way when I was gone.  It was clear that I’d already caused enough trouble by pretending to be a real person.  And then in my dream I just started to cry, because I realized I didn’t really have anything much to do for the rest of my (final) week.

I don’t usually post about angsty stuff.  (Maybe I’ll take this post down, later.)  But writing the dream out generally clears my head and lets me get on with my day.