On Stress Nightmares

I haven't had a good night's sleep in two weeks. My back still hurts and the fact that I have gone to the bar twice in the last week hasn't helped. If I consume alcohol, I can't stay asleep and I become dehydrated very easily. I didn't know how stressed out I felt until after my interview on Monday, when the urge to vomit, cry, run 10 miles and curl up into a ball hidden somewhere in the stacks hit me at exactly the same time. No wonder Hubby thinks I'm crazy and indecisive.

I have reoccuring nightmares that arrive when I have high moments of stress. The first type of nightmare places me in a car that has malfunctioning brakes. In these dreams I press on the brake but the car won't stop. Sometimes the car speeds up (usually because I am rolling downhill) and othertimes it doesn't. The car never really stops, it just slows down enough to shift gears and roll in a new direction and the sensation of being out of control, knowing that the car is going to crash with me in it continues until I wake up. Often the car is on a bridge or a narrow road. I side swipe fences, trees, houses, and other cars as I frantically try to control the runaway car. I never hit anything (because that would actually stop the car), I just come really, really, really close to crashing until I change direction and then nearly crash into something else. I had this type of dream on Saturday night.

I have the other type of reoccuring stress dream at the end of every summer when I know that I have to return to the classroom. In these dreams, I'm teaching a class that is made up of all the most obnoxious, rude, mean and disrespectful students I've ever taught. Now that I've taught more than 1,000 students, these classes tend to be really big. In these dreams, I'm trying desperately to control the classroom and teach something (usually German), but the students are throwing things and yelling at me. They say things like "Why should we listen to you?" "Shut up!" or "Are you done yet?" Then they all leave the classroom and I remain alone, wondering what I did wrong. Or they stay and continue to rob me of my sleep until I wake up and remember that I will never teach a class with 13-, 16-, 18-, 21- and 30-year-olds in the same class, especially not with all of my worst students together (This is exactly why I left the school district that would be stupid enough to actually place such students together in one class... and that district is doing that to its language teachers next year!).

I haven't had the typical teaching nightmare since August, but on Sunday night I dreamt that my brightest, most talented and inspirational students were together in the same class and they were disappointed in me. I wasn't challenging them enough and my classes weren't interesting anymore. This dream was worse than the out-of-control-classroom nightmare, because rather than annoying people who weren't doing what they were supposed to, I was boring people because I suddenly wasn't good enough anymore.

That should suffice for nightmares, right? Well on Monday night I had a new stress nightmare-- the academic nightmare! In this nightmare, I was at a big linguistics conference at a big shot university somewhere far away. I had just stepped away from the microphone after successfully presenting a paper only to find out that I had to present another paper in another room somewhere else in 10 minutes. I looked at the conference bill and wondered "How can this be?! Conferences only allow the submission of one abstract! I didn't submit two abstracts!" I read the title of my second talk and wondered what on earth I would have to say about famous field linguist X's work and the implications it had for typological sampling methods (this was the equivalence of making the argument that because people saw a movie of a a dog eating, I should change the way that I organize the cards in my wallet... they have nothing to do with each other and no one would want to hear me talk about that). Nevertheless, the second conference room was packed with people waiting to hear me talk and I had nothing to say. Then, while pondering how this conundrum realized itself in the first place, I discovered that I had two talks the next day as well... on linguistic topics that I know nothing about! Then I woke up. Apparently these dreams aren't uncommon among academics because when I mentioned them in the department office yesterday, two professors started laughing and welcomed me to the world of academia. Both professors have had the same dream. We laughed and talked about other stress nightmares.

I often have failure dreams in which I am in a high school basement looking for my math or science class that I haven't attended since the first week of the semester. I realize that I am going to fail and won't graduate high school. Somehow I always end up with a guidance councelor who tells me that I am not going to graduate. In these dreams, I argue with the councelor in this order: "But I graduated from high school 11 years ago!" "But I already graduated from college!" "But I taught high school for 2.5 years!" "But I have two more college degrees than you do AND I am going to have a PhD in a year!" The reponse to each of my arguments is a slow negating shake of the head, a blank face, and "It doesn't count. You're going to fail." Thankfully I haven't had that dream too this week, but it won't surprise me if I do.

Last night I only slept for 2 hours, so I wasn't able to have a nightmare. I'm thankful for the break from bad dreams, but some beauty sleep wouldn't hurt. My laptop AC power chord isn't working well, so I ordered another one. While I looked at Amazon's shipping options, I decided to order myself a hammock as well. For $18, I figure I can't go wrong. Especially since it took off $8 for shiping the power chord. So let's hope that the extra $10 for the hammock will lead to a summer with relaxation and copious amounts of progress writing Geraldine.