Unlike some of you, I'm still on semester break while the college runs a 6-week winter session. My life is a pleasantly paced mix of working out, walking the dog, putting the house back in order, and meeting my kid after school. So it's a mystery why I had my recurring nightmare about academia last week.
In the dream I've forgotten that I signed up for a certain class. I've missed a lot, but then finally remember to attend, only to learn that there's an exam today, for which I haven't done the reading. Also, I have no notes to use for the open notes portion. Everyone else is writing busily, and I'm buzzing with rising panic.
This dream comes in various guises. Sometimes I actually see the exam questions and rack my brains for details about some area out of my field, like geometry-based word problems or political history of the Gilded Age. Sometimes it's French in high school, and I'm trapped again in that smelly building; sometimes it's economics in college, and I'm lost again on campus. A few times the dream has involved teaching, and then the rising panic is due to being late for the first day of class, and then realizing that I forgot to write a syllabus. Or put on pants.
Mind you, I'm 26 years out of college, 16 years out of grad school and tenured. Never ONCE have I fucked up as royally as I do in this dream.
If recurrent dreams are about post-traumatic stress, then my experience of academia has been pretty traumatic. Helena from Homestead's post and the replies (which I didn't read until after the nightmare) suggest that the first few years of grad school are traumatic for many of us.
So, fellow Miserables, here's the Thirsty:
Do you, or did you, have academic nightmares? What are (were) they about? Did you stop having them at some point? Did you ever commit the act you dream about doing? (I'm especially interested in hearing about those who taught a class and then realized they'd forgotten pants. And underpants.)
I still have those nightmares. I am 13 years out of grad school. I dream I didn't know I was registered for a class and now I have to take the final, but I can not find the room. Mostly, I am lost in these dreams, unable to find the room. The feeling of panic is overwhelming.
ReplyDeleteHow, you might ask, did Snarkygirl manage to reply before this Thirsty was published? I published it last week, failing to change the date of the draft. The CM Moderator patiently replied to my puzzled email and granted me the indulgence of changing the date and reposting it.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Snarky, for reading the older posts.
Call Leonard Nimoy; there's an "In Search Of...." episode in this somewhere.
ReplyDeleteA lot of people have those dreams. My dad still does, 40 years after college. Mine usually involve a math class I haven't attended all semester, or a failure to find my history class. Once I dreamed I was in a Chinese final, panicking because I had only studied Russian. And once, that I had not done a giant astronomy project due after the final.
ReplyDeleteI've been out of undergrad for 17 years and grad for over 12 and I still have that dream sometimes. Usually it's the end of the semester and I realize I've been forgetting to attend a class, and/or I can't find the room. I haven't had one about teaching yet, but it's probably only a matter of time...
ReplyDeleteI get the run-of-the-mill teaching anxiety dreams before every semester, mostly involving forgetting all about the first day of classes or showing up completely unprepared. Those are pretty mundane. The job market anxiety dreams, however, were awesome.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite was the one in which I got an unexpected job offer from a school at which I'd previously had a disastrous MLA interview. The job I was offered in my dream was a joint appointment with the religion department; I would be teaching a course called "Apples to Apocalypse," which I thought would be a survey of the Bible, but it turned out to be a course about how computers are destroying human civilization.
I tried to decline the job, on the grounds that I knew nothing about either religion or computers. Then my mother, my advisor, the most terrifyingly polished of my fellow grad students, and (for some reason) J.R.R. Tolkien came over to my apartment to yell at me for declining a perfectly good tenure-track offer. And then Tolkien also chewed me out for my lack of expertise on religion. And then we played Trivial Pursuit.
I miss nothing else about the job market, but I kinda miss dreams like that.
I have them constantly. Of course, I'm a grad student. Anxiety is kind of part and parcel.
ReplyDeleteI have had dreams where my high school principle comes and tells me I didn't pass Senior English and I have to come back and finish the credits so I can have my high school diploma. In some of the dreams I actually have to go do class!
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ReplyDeleteI have this horrible recurring nightmare that I have to teach classes full of dullards, who never read anything, never even crack or even buy the books, never take notes because it never seems to occur to them that it may help to do so, don't ever really think much about anything except getting drunk or laid, think of anything requiring intelligence as "stupid" (their term, not mine), rarely wash, and have worse reading, writing, and critical thinking skills than I did in 3rd grade, and no math skills whatsoever. Worse, they all have this strong sense of entitlement that they all deserve an A, on their way to careers as wealthy celebrities, starring in their own shows similar to "Jersey Shore." Any good students who care about learning who have the misfortune of being in the same classes as these yahoos get stomped upon, or worse, turned into these nincompoops. Even worse, I am trapped with these pea-brains for the rest of my career, and the crummy job market makes certain I can never get away. Worst of all, the future of the country is in their hands.
ReplyDeleteIt's even worse than the dream I had about defeating a vampire. I put a stake through his heart and dragged his coffin into the sunlight, the whole bit. I had this dream when I was department chair and was having a terrible fight with some university administrator (naturally, about something this fool invented that was quite inconsequential): at least that one ended happily.
I have a recurring nightmare of not having studied for undergraduate abstract algebra all semester and just randomly reading pages of the text in a panic before the exam.
ReplyDeleteThis is about fifteen years after PhD.
I used to have topology and quantum mechanics nightmares, in which I could see various infinite dimensional spaces. These dreams ended after I turned to studying a different sort of physics.
I keep waking up early, too early, to find my brain furiously processing pedagogical conundrums and trying to get everything organised for the beginning of semester. No imaginary situations, but reality. This morning I even found myself solving a problem which isn't even for any of the courses I teach, but for one of my colleagues.
ReplyDeleteFML, I have that dream too. Only it's college, and I never really got my B.A., which renders my Ph.D. invalid, so I have to go back and take introductory hamster-fur knitting or whatever. The other version is: I'm still *in* college and keep failing over and over, but expected to teach at my university 1,000 miles away anyway.
ReplyDeleteSoon after I finally managed to finish my dissertation, I started having dreams that I hadn't finished high school, and needed to go back. I'd understand if I'd been having this dream during the years when I was juggling adjuncting and trying to finish the diss., but it started up *after* I successfully defended, and was handed a letter I could show to anyone who needed confirmation of the fact, and marched around in a gown and hood, and received a diploma that says I'm a Ph.D., and ordered a copy of my transcript reflecting the degree (can you tell it took me a while to convince myself that I'd really, finally finished)?
ReplyDeleteWhat's more, I know, from a real-life example, that it's not necessary to have a high school diploma to receive a B.A., let alone a Ph.D.; one of the more brilliant but somewhat immature members of my prep school graduating class received deferred admission to Harvard during our junior year, skipped her senior year, and needed to pick up an English credit somewhere during her gap year in order to get her high school diploma. She never bothered, but graduated from Harvard nonetheless.
I'm not sure quite when that nightmare stopped coming, but I think it was after I survived a major non-academic crisis in my life, and, after it was over, started having nightmares that put me back in the middle of those events. Those nightmares have mostly receded, 6 years or so after the crisis. Maybe nightmares are a way of processing traumatic events?
And yes, I have variations of the don't have a syllabus/didn't even know I was supposed to be teaching a class and now grades are due/not completely dressed teaching nightmare. In fact, on more rushed mornings, I've been known to take a moment, as I rush to the car, to mentally inventory and/or physically check whether I'm wearing all the layers of clothing with which I customarily appear in public. So far, I haven't found any missing.
@Sultans: If your doctor can prescribe LSD, it can help this problem a lot.
ReplyDelete@FML, Frog and Toad, Cassandra:
ReplyDeleteThis happened to a character in Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano. It was for a college phys-ed credit, and the overbearing twerp richly deserved the predictable outcome.
It's late, I know, but I've been off caring for sick parents. Thanks, everybody, for your dreams. Special thanks to Fretful Porpentine, Sultans, and Froderick F. for sharing such creativity.
ReplyDelete@FML, Frog and Toad, Cassandra, and Froderick:
I am still missing a high school phys-ed credit but, oddly, have never had a nightmare about that.
@Cassandra:
Your last-minute clothing check reminds me that I still don't know whether it was just a dream when I failed to close my nursing bra and blouse after breastfeeding my baby in a student office in grad school. Those days were so groggy, I could have been sleepwalking and dreaming this nightmare as I walked down the hall.