Bad news for all you high school and college students out there; I am still having the Classic School Nightmare. Had it again last night: you know, the “can’t find the classroom/didn’t study for finals/can’t remember today’s schedule” dreams?
Worse news: my Mom’s in her 70s, and SHE still has them! I assume we are not alone in this?
I still get 'em. Mrs. Cal gets 'em (although she’s started going back to classes, so it’s OK for her to have those dreams).
One of my favorite comedy movie scenes is in Top Secret, where Val Kilmer is being tortured by the Nazi/Commie Bad Guys (it’s extremely fake looking torture – they are lethargically “whipping” him) and he drops into unconsciousness. Here he dreams that he’s about to have a Major Test – and he hasn’t studied! Then he wakes up, relieved to find that he does not, in fact, have a Major Test. He’s syill being whipped by Nazi/Commies, but at least he doesn’t have a Major Test.
I think I had one a few weeks ago. I seldom remember my dreams for long, so I’m not sure, but I think I did.
Were you naked or in your underwear in your dream, Eve? Because you are in mine.
Just had one last night.
“Were you naked or in your underwear in your dream, Eve? Because you are in mine.”
—[blushing prettily] Oddly enough, I never have “walking around nekkid” dreams. Maybe because of . . . Well, I used to dress in 1920s–'50s thrift shop clothing when I was in college, and the seams weren’t always what they might have been. So I had quite a reputation for losing my clothing in public. I guess when it happens to you in real life, you don’t dream it . . .
But those school dreams! In the one last night, I couldn’t remember what class came next or where it was, and I’m sure if I had gotten there before the alarm clock went off I’d have discovered that I hadn’t studied once.
Rastahomie, was that you I ran into as I frantically ran around the campus last night?
Funny you should ask… I dreamed it was time for finals. I was in Clown College. I was supposed to yodel, but I didn’t know how, and I kept arguing that clowns don’t yodel.
Well, no, actually, I didn’t dream that. I just wanted so much to be a part of this thread… how pathetic is that?
I’ll just eat my yogurt quietly and not bother anyone for a while. Sorry…
Oddly enough that reminds me of a dream I had a few months ago. I was at my old high school and I had to entertain a bunch of 2nd graders. So I changed into a clown suit and gave them a short juggling/song and dance routine. I remember being very angry they “didn’t get it” (exact words from the dream). I then spent the last half hour or so wandering around the school trying to find a place to change.
Do any of you get that fake geography thing? I find that whenever I dream about my school it goes from being 1 floor/several hundred feet long to roughly the size of a small city.
No, I never seem to dream about real places. I create settings for my dreams – usually “The University” and “The City”. They don’t resemble anything from real life, and they change from dream to dream.
Same here. And I get The University Dream a lot.
My slumberland Alma Mater is impossibly huge and complex and architecturally Gothic in a grotesquely overblown way…huge leering gargoyles placed on the outside of buildings AT EYE LEVEL, claustrophobic winding stone staircases leading up to cramped dorm rooms and study carrels, brutally colossal gymnasiums and arenas and libraries and cathedrals.
Sort of like Albert Speer had decamped and taken a job designing the Yale Campus back in the 1930s.
Needless to say, part of the nightmare aspect of these halls of learning is the fact that I Didn’t Study, and the Big Test is coming up in fifteen minutes.
I’ve never had the naked dream, either, but one of my favorites episodes of Winsor McKay’s 1905 comic strip “Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend” was the one where the guy goes back to the office for his rubbers, dressed in his long johns, shoes and spats, tail-coat, cane, and top hat…and no trousers.
Everyone says to him “You haven’t forgotten something, have you?” and he replies “Yes, as if it’s any of your business, and I’m on my way to fetch them!”
– Ukulele “Weoh! You cannot tell me that Dutchman did not put something into that rarebit besides ale. Weoh! That was a rough one. No more toasted cheese for Willie.” Ike
Ive experienced a similar thing - I’ll be in the house where I grew up and I’ll notice a door that was never there before, opening into an entirely different, huge house. It’s especially weird because I grew up in a row house - or “townhome” as they’re now called. In the dream I’m always angry that I never knew about the bigger house and I got stuck sharing a little room with my sister. I’m sure there’s some deep, disturbing psychological meaning to all this…
I haven’t had the “back in school” dream, but I have had something worse: the week after I graduated Georgetown, I dreamt that it had all been a dream and I was back working at the McDonald’s where I’d been before going off to school.
Fortunately, I had the good sense to tell the boss I quit on the spot and woke right up.
“Ukulele ‘Weoh! You cannot tell me that Dutchman did not put something into that rarebit besides ale. Weoh! That was a rough one. No more toasted cheese for Willie.’ Ike”
—Ees it any wonder dat we loaf diss guy?
I used to have the Test dream. I haven’t had that in years. Years and years and years. God I love being a slacker.
I occasionally have dreams where I’m insufficiently clad, but they’re only mildly uncomfortable, rather than terrifying.
My best dream was when (in the waking world) I was going to see an ex of mine for breakfast. I woke up, was excited about seeing her again, and then noticed feet sticking out from under my bed. I pulled on them, and out came the corpse of my ex. And then I woke up.
I have these occasionally, but one sticks with me. I’m out in a wasteland populated by craggy rocks you’re supposed to sit on. I’m perched on one and given an English test by my RL 12th grade English teacher, but I know it’s supposed to be college. I spend awhile reading the questions, thinking, I don’t recognize any of this. It dawns on me that I didn’t take this class after all and I don’t need to take the test. The relief was wonderful!
I don’t usually have dreams where I’m naked in public, but I do have some where I can’t find some piecse of clothing and it’s getting later and later for where I have to be. …and I just can’t get there…
If it’s any consolation, once I started teaching I started having the school dream from both perspectives. Sometimes I hadn’t studied for the test and sometimes I hadn’t prepared my lecture notes. Geez.
My going back to college dreams are always kind of fun, though. The school itself is always quite different from the way it was, but I get that lovely “first day of college in the big city” feeling along with it. It’s almost disappointing to wake up.
I get the clothing dream, too, gigi. Usually I’m late for something, but the dream forces me to try on every piece of clothing I own in every possible combination.
The worst one, though, is when I’m trying to dial one of those impossibly long phone card numbers–over and over and over. How boring is that? Come on–if I’m going to have a nightmare, lets get some hairy monsters in here. Let’s pile on some dark Freudian symbolism. (And, no, I don’t want to speculate on the Freudian symbolism of not being able to get my buttons pushed right.)
I get them sometimes. My husband and I call them “anxiety dreams” and just figure I had something on my mind that was making me anxious. I we go tearing around school looking for my next class (in a building that seems to get bigger while I’m looking) or my “favorite”–when for some reason I missed the first several classes and I know I’m never going to be able to catch up and everyone knows more than I do.
Man, I hate those.
I remember sometimes having a REALLY unpleasant variant on this theme when I was at school ; when there was an assignment due that I was having a lot of difficulty with I would sometimes dream that I had completed it and handed it in, and have an enormous feeling of relief and happiness. Then I’d wake up and I still had it all to do. And I could NEVER remember what I’d written for it in the dream.
When I first started college I kept having dreams that I was back in high school for some dreadful unspecified reason. Once or twice the reason was my poor math skills, which is perfectly understandable actually, but there wasn’t usually one given. gets chills
Tests have never inspired any particular fear in me, for various reasons, so I never get the “test” dreams. I do occasionally have “altered geography/architecture” dreams about my university (Louisiana State U). The campus is pretty big (around a mile square, I would guess) and rather picturesque anyway, with its huge oak trees, aged crepe myrtles, and sheltered little dells. Just imagine it being many miles square, gifted with baroque architecture, honeycombed with even more underground passages, and the site of a terrible battle against horrific monsters in the dark of the moon.
I kind of enjoy that dream. Some of the monsters vaguely resemble particularly despised professors, and the good guys win.
I get that dream occasionaly. Also the weird geography one slortar mentioned, where the school is way bigger than it should be, hallways are miles long…creepy.
I usually wake up in a cold sweat, and have to take a moment to reassure myself that high school is way in the past before I can function.
What does it mean?