Storytime Thursday: Night School Dream Theater

In times of stress, my body and I are enemies to each other. I stay up well into the morning. I eat boxes of Triscuits with hummus and string cheese for dinner. I hangover too easily. I've been leaving my keys everywhere I set them down, calling one person when I want someone else, forgetting words I know (recently: oxymoron, roving, theremin; at a loss, I asked for a "star-nosed screwdriver," when I clearly meant "Phillips head").

My sleep, of late, is punctuated by vivid anxiety dreams. Some of them are standard fare—like, I'm in a hurry to go do something but I can't for the life of me manage to put my clothes on, or I'm reading a story aloud and my teeth start crumbling into my hands, or I'm crossing the street to get my mail out of the box and I sink into the asphalt like it's quicksand (and then I'm stuck there, helpless, with just my head poking out of the road, facing oncoming traffic).

I am afraid of the MFA program I never expected to get into, and I am afraid of teaching. I'll be confronting both of these fears in about two weeks. In the meantime, I've been devoting myself to incredibly involved, dextrous tasks that forestall active dread of the immediate future. But the dread creeps in while I am sleeping. And so it was, a few nights ago—shortly after I spent two hours trying to teach myself four-ball juggling patterns instead of drafting a syllabus—that I earned the following epic nightmare about my first class.

The classroom resembled most of the spaces where I'd studied literature as an undergraduate—chalkboard in the front, empty TV frame in the corner, windows along one side of the wall, and a long rectangular table in the middle with twenty or so chairs clustered around it, maybe some chairs along the side of the wall, too. I was standing at the head of the table, where teachers stand, and my fresh-faced, non-English-major sophomores were filing into the room in twos and threes, taking out notebooks, fidgeting with phones, having conversations about how hot it is at the end of August. I started the class, introduced myself, and passed around a bunch of paper (like the the booklist, syllabus, my expectations for written work, and other things I haven't figured out yet). I asked if I'd made enough copies for everyone, and then I felt a sharp pain in my stomach, doubled over, and threw up a pomeranian.

Pomeranian
(special thanks to TheLawleys for the photo)

It shot out of my esophagus with the breathless energy typical of the breed and began racing around the table, panting demonically, tearing through everyone's papers, knocking over water bottles, upsetting everything in its path.

A bespectacled redhead gasped, her hand flying up to cover her mouth. An Elijah-Wood-looking guy raised his eyebrows and drew his face down into his neck in sneering, double-chinned disgust. Someone said, "That's sick." Someone else said, "Jesuschrist." I tried to apologize. I wanted to say, "OH MY GOD. I am SO SORRY, YOU GUYS." I made an effort, but my jaw was stuck open, so I managed only "DOH-DAA-GAH," and drooled on myself instead. There was the sound of chairs being pushed back, of backpacks being lifted off the ground. I rested my hand on the corner of the table to stop the room from spinning. And then I vomited a sundry pile of office supplies—scissors, staplers, paperclips, pens and pencils, a three-hole punch complete with its moon-phase confetti. Everyone fled, and I knelt on the carpet, open-mouthed and alone, save for the pomeranian still robotically running circles atop a table of hastily abandoned things. It stopped only to bark a couple of times and do some backflips, like one of those battery-operated flipping puppies from the '80s.

And then I woke up and had a glass of water in the kitchen. Everyone has nightmares. I hardly need to explain that, no matter how ridiculous they seem in retrospect, they are always intense and distressing at the time (and invariably tedious in the retelling; you're welcome).

I went back to sleep and was rewarded with Asphalt Dream Reprise, in which my neighbor and a little boy tried to save me. They said that lying horizontally would keep you afloat, that this was how you rescued someone sinking in quicksand. I even had occasion to think, "Fuck me! I dreamed about this and should know what to do here!" But then the three of us were just drowning in the middle of the street, and the little boy reached through the muck and held my hand.

After that, I got up, went back to the kitchen, took a shot of whisky, watched the sunrise, and got all nostalgic for the days when I would dream about nothing especially memorable.

In short, I am not sleeping well.

In other news, I begin packing for the big move in earnest this weekend. For this reason, and with gratitude for your understanding, the posting around here might be light for a couple of weeks.