I confess to having dreams from time to time that feature slightly misarranged adventures either on the U of C campus or its environs. The one last night involved the Hyde Park Bank on 53rd and anxieties arising from the purchase of a record (these were vinyl days, of course) in which the change given me was all in foreign banknotes. I won’t go further than that. The experience of the dream made me wonder whether others on this board ever have dreams directly or indirectly about college life - whether prospective, current or even long past.
I still dream about missing all my classes and having a huge paper due or final exam. I have another one about having to repeat high school.
My daughter told me that the night before she flew home for Spring Break, she had a nightmare about forgetting to pack her retainers. Of course I quizzed her on whether she had them with her. She did.
I have a couple different college related “anxiety dreams” that I am always relieved to awaken from. Luckily I don’t have these very often!
One is about coming to the end of the semester but never having gone to class or done the reading/assignments for a particular class. I am frantically trying to find a way to drop the class or come up with a plausible story that will get me out of having a failing grade on my transcript.
I also have a dream where it’s opening night of a play that I’m in and I haven’t learned my lines. Again, I’m frantically trying to come up with a way to get out of my predicament. (And I was not actually in any theatrical productions in college!)
You’d think after 30+ years, I’d be over it ?. Why don’t I have fun dreams about exciting home football weekends or getting A’s in my classes?
Ah, the old unpreparedness dream: My version of it would be finding myself in a public place, sometimes like a classroom, and being about to speak - but finding I could not think of what to say. That’s a dream all too close to life itself!
In this recent dream other anxieties may have been at work. Buying a record was always a big splurge for me at college. Getting the change back in bills of dubious negotiability was a puckish little add-on to a commonplace economic anxiety. Then there was the Kafkaesque nuance - attempting to get these bills from various foreign nations honored at the Hyde Park Bank (which was near the record store in the 55th street mall in any event). Having recently travelled abroad and having made currency exchanges at my home bank must have had something to do with the dreamwork (as Dr. Freud called it), mixing more recent anxieties up with old ones, and I had once indeed had a bank account in that old bank in Hyde Park - the one with the high coffered ceiling, marble flooring and general aspect of a Greek temple. Yet the teller looked at me with incredulity and disdain and told me my money was no good. I seemed to accept this, he had me dead to rights, and I started disconsolately to trudge homeward to my old digs in HP - when I awoke, no longer a student, no longer an anguished occasional buyer of records, no longer a lowly fellow who could be abashed by a high and mighty bank teller (except that something inside me must have thought I was still all those things).
This is reminding me of a different kind of dream I used to have when I lived in a 12 x 18 ft studio in New York City. I would have dreams about finding additional rooms in my apartment that I hadn’t realized were there. Those dreams were fun, and I was disappointed when I woke up. Now I live in the suburbs and have too much square footage - no more dreams about finding space.
When I told my dad about my “space-finding” dreams, he said that when he was first starting out and had two little kids, he used to dream about finding bags of money.
I loved the inside of Hyde Park bank. The light was such that my little engagement ring would just catch on fire inside that place. So it was more than beautiful marble and high ceilings - it also had GREAT lighting!
On occasion when awaiting some major news, I’ll dream of the outcome beforehand. In practically every case, the reality has been the exact opposite of what I dreamt. This has happened with both good news and bad and I can think of maybe one time where the dream and the reality actually aligned. I don’t know enough about Freud to understand how he would have interpreted such happenings - I prefer to think of them as useful nonsense.
I’ve definitely had dreams of being unprepared for a test in school, they were nightmares. Those have stopped for a long time now, thank goodness. Dreams are so fun, if you can remember them that is. It’s like being able to live a totally different life, and have experiences you never could, or want to, in reality. (or are we dreaming even now, lol).
If I went to a school like Chicago and that lovely campus, and had all those conversations with my peers, I’d be dreaming about that too.
I was not a great student at the beginning of my undergrad career. Often times, I’d miss a class and that would lead me to missing another and another and then dropping. Now I dream of running around campus on Finals day looking for my final. Running frantically from building to building, floor to floor, room to room, looking for my class. Only to find it as the class was letting out, the final was over. Random people in my life would be “professor” and just smirk at me as I stand in the doorway, a wreck.
@BrianBoiler I had those type of dreams during and right after college, now, not so much. We must have had similar college experiences. 