Keyword: Skipping Classes
Oct
'07
Recently, I’ve been having several dreams about skipping class. They aren’t always actively about skipping class, where I’m in the dream thinking “I really don’t feel like going to class today,” and then don’t. For the most part, it seems, either I forget to go to class all together, I don’t realize I’m in school and should be going to class until someone reminds me, or I’ve gotten to the point already that I’ve skipped so many classes, I should probably start going to school again.
I think these are recurring dreams since I got out of high school, during which I never skipped a class, but they were always past classes that I was skipping. I never dreamt during college that I was skipping a class that I was currently taking. When I graduated college, my dreams moved from classes I may have taken to classes which were completely out of the blue and weird - dream classes, like Mathematics classes which required you to draw clouds and Paleontology classes which weren’t offered at my college but I’m damn sure that would have been awesome.
Sometimes the focus isn’t even on school; I’ll just suddenly think about how many classes I’ve skipped while I’m saving the world or running for my life, or enacting in some other dream which seems wholly unrelated to school. Clearly this is an issue.
I am fascinated with dream dictionaries and the idea of a collective conscious, but I don’t actually believe dreams “tell the future” or any such nonsense. I think that recurring dreams can bring to light an anxiety or issue, or even a happiness in your life, but that this doesn’t always necessarily pan out. Honestly, I haven’t looked into it enough to make a real statement of what I believe as far as dreams go, but I have visited the New Age section several times, reading up on what fortune tellers and astrologers alike think dreams mean, and I know I don’t agree with that. I don’t think anyone’s mind can tell them the future, and certainly not through a series of random synapses.
I’d like, however, to know what this could possibly mean. I’m not going to seek experts; usually what I do is look up an online dream dictionary and take their interpretation of it and morph that into my own. It all makes sense, of course - dreaming about your lover cheating means you’re anxious about him cheating, or that you’re seeing signs of him cheating but you won’t admit it to yourself; dreaming of trains is symbolic of life’s journey and your interpretation of your journey based on what happens on the train.
I am curious, however. I want to know what it means to have a recurring dream about skipping class not only throughout school (that could be explained easily) but continually once you’re out of school, not always about the specific college you went to (sometimes it’s about being at another college in another stage of my life, about visiting someone else’s high school and skipping their classes too, or about having to go back to high school even though I’m my current age and then skipping classes then), and when you don’t have any plans to re-attend school. I can’t possibly be having a literal anxiety about skipping classes; I’m not in school, I don’t plan to go back unless it’s for an abruptly obtained associate’s degree which will probably consist mostly of online classes, and I’m not in any way holding on to any “regrets” I may have had throughout high school and college - I never skipped class in the former, and I skipped a healthy amount in the latter. My grades wouldn’t have been any higher.
Clear to me is that this is not about skipping classes. It’s some other anxiety, or perhaps the skipping classes is symbolic of something else. I’m usually pretty good at putting my finger on it and dealing with it, but this time I’ve reached out for help I can’t find. Even typing “school” as a keyword isn’t coming up, and when it does, it’s not about skipping classes. It’s gotten to the point where it’s actually starting to bug me - not that I can’t find answers, but that I just keep having these dreams. Sometimes I’m totally cool with it, others I get completely stressed out that I’ll fail.
I don’t associate school with life. I’m using my degree in an extremely peripheral way; I’m an English major who decided to make a career out of bookselling. I find it to suit me perfectly. But maybe sometimes I’m okay with the way things are going, and sometimes I feel like I’ll totally fail in life.
Or maybe it’s something else entirely.
Leave A Reply
