{"id":2607,"date":"2005-01-30T09:45:37","date_gmt":"2005-01-30T17:45:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2005\/01\/30\/2607.html"},"modified":"2020-02-05T23:13:34","modified_gmt":"2020-02-06T07:13:34","slug":"anxiety-dreams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2005\/01\/30\/anxiety-dreams\/","title":{"rendered":"Anxiety dreams"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Last night I went to a birthday party\/story reading<\/a> for a high school friend, Mark. It was nice, even though I didn't get a chance to read the thing I most wanted to read (\"Clear Glass Marbles,\" a piece from Jane Martin's play Talking With...<\/cite>). I read a brief Barthelme piece instead, \"The first thing the baby did wrong...<\/a>\" [Note added in 2020: Content warning for mistreatment of a baby in a way that echoes abuse scenarios.] It went over very well; lots of laughter, lots of applause, several compliments later. Other people read a bunch of interesting stuff, too, but the only thing that's especially standing out in my memory at the moment was a brief very funny bit about reading adult stuff (like Rimbaud) aloud to a baby in ways that the kid will enjoy, from Mark Leyner's Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog<\/a><\/cite>.<\/p>\r\n

Got home late, spent a little while sleepily replying to a couple of email messages, stumbled off to bed. Slept reasonably well (I've been sleeping pretty well lately, except that I keep waking up in the middle of the night, but at least these days I can usually get back to sleep fairly quickly), but toward the end of my sleep I had a dream in which I was in college and Mark was teaching a class (about comic-book art, I think, which probably means that Jenn's comment about reading Understanding Comics<\/cite><\/a> stuck in my head) and I was taking the class and I hadn't done any homework or any of the reading, and eventually I went back to my dorm room to try to catch up on my homework (as often happens in these dreams, I hadn't done any schoolwork at all in weeks or months) but I couldn't find my dorm room. And so on. Eventually I woke up.<\/p>\r\n

Most of the elements of that are from assorted random sources of things I encountered yesterday, except for the not-having-done-the-homework anxiety part, which I suppose is probably due to a general feeling of being behind on everything.<\/p>\r\n

When I woke up, I realized that I never posted here about a dream I had back in '97, which I took to calling The Last Test Anxiety Dream, though I've had others now and then since then:<\/p>\r\n

This particular dream started out just like most of my test anxiety dreams. I walked into the lecture hall and the teacher handed out the test; I looked it over, knew I’d done all the wrong reading for the course, knew there was no way I could answer more than one or two of the questions. And then I said to myself, “Wait—I don’t need to take this exam.” And I got up and walked out of the lecture hall into the bright sunlight.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last night I went to a birthday party\/story reading for a high school friend, Mark. It was nice, even though…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2607"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2607\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18396,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2607\/revisions\/18396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}