It was a finals exam anxiety dream. I think it’s sad that I have these as a professor, but I do, every semester. The exams come back from the copy shop blank, or jibberish, or, as was the case in this dream, not at all. I arrive and the room where I’m supposed to be giving the exam has burned down, or trashed by hooligans, or, as is the case this time, I can’t find it at all.
So I can’t find the room that the exam is supposed to be in. While wandering around with a sad little herd of students trailing along after me, suddenly I realize, OMIGOD, I never did get the exams back from the copy shop. Why didn’t I think of this before?
Okay, now, here’s where practice pays off. I read the suggestion that when you’re awake, you should periodically ask yourself, “Am I dreaming?”, and especially you should ask it when something weird happens, or when something that recurrs often in your dreams happens. (For me, it’s riding on escalators, misjudging stopping distances while driving, driving toward a bridge or overpass, and a few other things.) The idea is that you get into the habit of asking, “Am I dreaming?” and then eventually you ask it when you’re dreaming, and you find that the answer is yes!
So that’s what happened. I noticed some kind of weird stuff. I have already scouted out the room the exam was in (in the waking world, I mean), and it was in the building right next door, so why was lost? And what campus is this, after all? There’s the concert hall, but then shouldn’t this be the engineering quad? But wait, that concert hall is from my undergraduate days! Also, the pavement just didn’t look right.
I asked myself, “Am I dreaming?” and I realized that I was dreaming.
So what did I do? Teach myself to fly? Summon forth images of breathtaking beauty? Have mad, sweaty monkey sex with Russel Crowe?
No.
I thought to myself, “If this is just a dream, then I can will the exams into existence.”
Sheesh. Dedication to my profession? Utter lack of imagination? You make the call.
Anyway, so I tried to make the exams appear in my hands, and that just wasn’t working. I could kind of get them to be there in a droopy, squishy, fuzzy way, but then they’d fade away. It was too hard for me to go from “hands empty” and all the sensory data that entails, to “hands carrying exams.” Then a brainstorm hit: imagine that they were there all along. Yup. They’re here, it’s just that one of my students is carrying them. And that worked! I turned around and said, “Hey, Heather, can you hand me the exams?” and there they were, a nice tall stack of exam booklets and bluebooks, no less. (If you play Amber, this is creepily like shifting Shadow, isn’t it?)
Lucidity slipped away sometime after that and I spent the rest of the dream wandering all over a weird campus looking for the room. I guess the usual question still remains. Was this a true lucid dream, or was I just dreaming that I was having a lucid dream? If I was really lucid, I should have been able to realize that I could escape from the whole exam scenario, right?