goodandevil

The Evil | Anxiety Dreams

While I’d never consider myself a modern-day Prometheus, since he had it far worse, I occasionally endure a major annoyance the picks and pecks at me in a similar way with almost no control over the situation: the anxiety dream.

You know the kind. Some people are naked in public, other people are racing or being chased, but mostly it’s a real-life scenario, most likely from your past, which seeks to haunt you in the present. My particular variety, more often than not, is a school dream.

I’ve been out of school for a while, and yet I’ve had every single school I’ve ever gone to be the setting of a dream or nightmare. Not only that, but the classmates don’t even have to belong to the respective schools. I’ve had elementary students in high school, vice versa, and even mixed bags of people that never would’ve met each other. Some of them I haven’t seen in ages and they show up in adult form.

But personal relationship anxiety only goes so far with me. What I can’t stand is the pressure-related school anxiety dream. You’re late for a class or totally miss it. Inside the span of a single dream I’ve taken a term where I didn’t have my schedule properly printed and wound up never attending a class for which I was signed up. I’ve missed final exams, started projects as if they were just assigned that are to be due after weeks of assumed work in just a few days, the whole gamut.

They’re very real while you’re in them, and I’ve even made plans to figure out how I’m going to get out of it, or how I’ll dupe people, or how I’ll steel my nerves against how horrible I’ll look when mine is the worst, least-resolved work of the bunch given my predicament.

For all that tension though, and perhaps because of it, there’s no sweeter relief than waking up and realizing all that bull is long behind you. I have my BA now, and a certified diploma for advanced study in my field - if I don’t choose to return to academia, I don’t have to go. It’s certainly got its benefits, but those are an option, not a mandate.

All that remains is for me to breathe deep, lay down an extra five minutes, then start my day where I’m my boss (until, of course, I deal with my actual boss, which isn’t so bad because he’s patient).

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