Wednesday, July 05, 2006

recurring dreams

it happened again last night. i don't know what it is, but i've been having a few recurring dreams over the past few years. one of them i've been having since high school and the other two probably started during my last years in college.

the first one involves my teeth. my back molars just start crumbling apart and soon i'm spitting pieces of my teeth out. creepy, i know. for a while i thought it was a strange dream, but then my curiosity got the best of me and i did a search for common recurring dreams on the internet. turns out it's one of the most common ones, and there are a few meanings behind it, from anxiety about something in your life to not feeling that your voice is being heard. i actually haven't had that one in a while. guess i've been speaking up loud and clear.

the next two dreams i've been having a lot, especially since graduating from college, and maybe even during my final semester. oddly enough, both dreams involve high school. in the first one, i'm thrown onto stage because we're doing a reunion of "how to succeed in business without really trying" (my senior year musical) and i'm incredibly worried that we haven't had any rehearsals and i just keep praying that i'll remember my lines, dreading stepping onto the stage.



for some reason, i think the rest of the cast had been practicing without me and i was coming in late from college and could only make it for the actual preformances. my dream never goes as far as the actual performance, though, usually i just walk out on stage and say a few lines (they're actually a mix off all of the lines i can remember today) and then i wake up, relieved that it was only a dream.

the dream i had last night is also another "unprepared" one, and always involves the SAME PEOPLE and the SAME CLASS. i'm back in high school, i think even at my current age. the registatrion process is rushed, usually my transcript is messed up, and i'm running around trying to find mrs. nadeau's math class. i always get there and realize i don't have my homework, or sometimes my book, and i just sit there anxiously waiting to be yelled at, sometimes scrambling to pretend i did my homework. and of course there are always the smartest people in the class there, homework done, excited to be back in high school after finishing college. a lot of the time the layout of my high school is different and involves many floors and elevators and i'm running around completely lost. usually there's also a locker, thrown in, that i was supposed remember the combination to, although i hadn't used it in five years.

and i'm sure we're all familiar with the dreams that we have that feel real. at no point do we ever think "oh, i'm ok, it's just a dream and i'll wake up." these dreams always feel real. they're pretty easy to decipher, and it makes sense, i suppose, that they're starting up again. my days in korea are coming to an end and i'm looking at grad school programs and a new life chapter is about to begin. i suppose there's that subconscious uneasiness that i won't get accepted to any program (maybe because i'm unprepared like my dreams?). let's hope that doesn't happen.

in the meantime, i'll sleep with one eye open.

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