Recurring Dreams

I used to have two really cool recurring dreams from about age 8 to 16. One was an eerie setting in a huge open, grassy, hilly plain where I was constantly trying to escape from a loose tiger. As intimidating as it sounds, there was always some sort of understanding that I would never ACTUALLY get captured by the tiger, so the threat became a moot point. So I guess...the dream was just about me running around in fantasyland.

The second dream was much cooler. It hinged on an internal build-up of concentration that eventually grew so intense that I would be lifted off the ground and able to float/fly around. The more I concentrated, the higher I could go and the more control I had. Perfect analogy: those Magic Eye books where you had to keep looking really hard, but once you saw the 3-D image it was the greatest thing ever. You had to keep concentrating on the image to keep it from going away, but eventually you could train your eye to go into some sort of altered dimension where you could be making pizza in a brick oven, playing Jenga, and scanning stock prices in the newspaper all without losing focus. Then you'd make the mistake of bragging about this to your friends who could never get it and they would punch you in the eye. At least that's how it always ended for me.

From about 17-22 I didn't have many recurring dreams. If I did, they probably weren't dreams, they were hazy drunken memories I would have liked to THINK were dreams. But no, I actually DID steal someone's car that one time...accidentally.

Anyway, about a year after I graduated college, I started having a new recurring dream. It was me panicking in the middle of the night thinking I either had a paper due the next day that I had completely forgotten about, or coming to a sudden realization that I was enrolled in a math course that I completely forgot about and had only been to about one class in. Surprisingly, both of these scenarios prove WAY more nightmarish than the tiger dream ever came close to. I would actually wake up in the morning with a heartbeat over 100 with the intention of checking my syllabus. I think this dream is like a reality check for those times when I think, "Damn, I wish I was back in school."

And as of last night, my newest recurring dream is that I accepted a full-time teaching job at a local high school, but I always put off going to my first day of work. The school calls my house and says, "Mr. Sullivan! WHERE ARE YOU?!! THE KIDS ARE RUNNING AROUND LIKE CRAZY!!" The dream then takes on a sort of "Lord of the Flies" theme and I'm to blame for all the chaos. Still in the dream, I begin to wonder why the hell I ever agreed to be a teacher. Then I can't remember ever agreeing to it, so I dismiss the administrators as acid-freaks stuck in the 70's and go back to bed.

Let is be known, Future of America: I could care less.

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