Exam Dreaming
I have a recurring, very boring nightmare that goes like this: I’m not prepared for something I am about to be graded on. Papers, exams, (actually very few lab practicals or demonstrations of skill… my dream brain must believe I can fake my way through those), tests, quizzes, show-and-tells, finals, blue books—they’re all in there and my dream-self is not prepared. Last night I went to bed a little earlier than usual and got to enjoy something rare: the chance to wake up, realize you are pretty well rested, but notice you have few hours until you must start the day. It is said that you dream all night, but don’t remember your dreams; REM-heavy cycles in the pre-dawn hours are usually something to be savored, since during those you remember your dreams. But I’ve realized something: my brain must give me an exam I’m not ready for every single night, I just don’t usually remember it.
My brain is actually stressing me out while I am trying to rest.
Set aside the positive and practical implications of enforced exposure therapy that dreams offer, and you find a sad truth: the only time in our lives when we can literally make anything happen right before our very eyes, we are bound by the laws of physics and limitations of our realities. In a perverse restriction of the infinite possibility of dreaming, your subconscious realizes that you are imagining something new rather than reassembling something that has been, and pops you out of your dream. Your magnificent dream.
I used to have a dream I could fly. Not that I was subjected to flight, or I had a magnificent vista, no. I dreamed that I was a fully autonomous flying being. In the gray shadows of dreamscape, it always began the same way: I knew it was something I could do. And let me diverge for a second: isn’t that funny that when we are young, optimism leaves us with not only a rosier worldview, but also with a palpable sense of the possible? Why can’t I run the 100M that fast? Why shouldn’t I play that passage, jump that high, change that part of my world? What is this can not? Stultifying pessimism may be the high price of years of experience.
Anyhow, back to my dream: I found myself in a vibrant though colorless world, at the basketball pole of my parent’s home. In the shadowless, heatless midday, I ran a few corkscrews, my feet leaving the ground as I did, the geometry of my path continuing about itself as I rose into the sky. And nothing popped me out of it all. As I soared over hills and through clouds, nothing woke me up. For there was nothing preposterous or improbable about it—life was all possibility and the wind provided no resistance.