Start-Of-The-School-Year Anxiety Dreams

[dr_pretentious]

It's been a long time since September was the season of anxiety dreams for me. I had almost a decade off from living by the academic calendar, but now my older kid's in preschool a couple of days a week, so the First Day of School is a big deal at our house again.

Back when I taught freshman composition at Rutgers, my standard September anxiety dream went like this:
I would dream I was teaching at a high school, and since I'm just under five feet tall and look younger than I am, the administrators would mistake me for a student and force me to go through high school all over again. These dreams typically ended with me shouting futilely, "But wait! I have a Ph.D.! I don't have to be a matriculated student anywhere, ever again!" as a great vortex of wind pulled me back into the classroom. It was sort of like that scene in Return of the Jedi when Boba Fett gets pulled into the maw of the Mighty Sarlacc.

My new anxiety dream goes like this:
I'm desperate enough to take my old freshman composition job back, so I move my husband, my kids, and all of my in-laws back into the ramshackle grad student apartment Dan and I had when we first came to New Jersey. My mother-in-law even comes back from the dead to move in with us. I'm glad to see her, and I could really use the help with child care, but somehow I'm still doing all the housework and all the childrearing. Oh, and the teaching workload for my old job title has increased, which is saying something, since grading the papers used to make it a 70 hour per week gig during the school year. I miss the first meetings of all the classes I'm teaching, because my offspring need diaper changes and potty training help just when I need to go to campus, and nobody in my enormous household will step up in a timely way. Just before I wake, I lament to my baby that "I have to keep this job, or they'll all have moved to New Jersey for nothing."

Waking up from these is a huge relief.

October will be a pretty big relief, too.

Comments

[violet-moon25.livejournal.com]

That is one heck of an anxiety dream! I can also relate to the needing to get out of the house and no one will help with the kids theme. You might enjoy reading the book Bad Mother. I just finished it and it made me feel like much less of one.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I loved that book. Dan got it for me for Mother's Day a couple of yrars ago, along with a volume of essays called Because I Said So. They were exactly what I would have asked for if I'd had the spare attention to ask for anything. Hooray for intermittent spousal telepathy!

[showingup.livejournal.com]

Blimey. That includes everything except accidental inappropriate nakedness and spiders.

I'm emailing you something I hope will help.

[showingup.livejournal.com]

Hm. I have MP3s to send you, and each one exceeds the limit for sending by email. Point is that one of them is really, really effective in getting you to sleep, and sleep soundly and more calmly. I usually have weird dreams - a gift of constantly elevated stress hormones from the sleep disorder and the melatonin supplementation for imposing a circadian rhythm on myself - and that's really calmed down tremendously since using the sleep meditation. It's 35 minutes long, and I play it once I'm in bed. T is out within minutes.

The 4-track album is here. All the tracks are really excellent; the sleep track is worth the money on its own.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the recommendation. That's one more reason to look forward to moving the crib out of our room.

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

laughing...

[jeneralist.livejournal.com]

I would dream I was teaching at a high school, and since I'm just under five feet tall and look younger than I am, the administrators would mistake me for a student and force me to go through high school all over again.

Being taller wouldn't help. I've had a similar dream: my doctorate wouldn't be official until I completed a year of high school that I skipped. Somewhere in the middle of the dream, and of sophomore math, I'd remember that I had already finished all four years of high school.

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

Jesus, that's awesome! TWO of the women I respect have had this dream!

Me too

[anne kaufhold (from livejournal.com)]

I get the return-to-high school dreams now that Noa is in high school. And I always seem to be starting midway through the year with homework undone and tests skipped, lamenting 'I could do this stuff easily now, but I don't have time to make up a missed semester of homework!'

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

Oh my god.

I have variants of both of these dreams. I feel vindicated.

Hugging you!

[jeneralist.livejournal.com]

Have you had the one where your thesis advisor tells you that you're teaching a class? It's a nice counterpoint to the "oh, I need to take a final exam for a class I don't remember signing up for."

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

The one where you were supposed to teach a class that started two weeks ago and you forgot, and you haven't ode red books, and the students have been waiting for you?

Yes.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Oh, I get a variation in which the department has scheduled me to teach two different courses in the same time slot. Before I finished the Ph.D., I often hsad the one where I had to make up missed bit of high school.

I wonder what homeschooled people have anxiety dreams about. They must get anxious about something.

[onyxtwilight.livejournal.com]

They probably freak out every time they hear Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher." >:-)

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

I remember your old ramshackle apartment with great fondness!