I once had a dream so vivid and that caused me such anxiety that it has burned itself into my memory, to the point that I had the dream again later, and that this weird part of my mind actually thinks it happened, and I have to remind myself when it pops up that it was all nonsense.
A short story:
So in college, I discovered for the first time that for many of my classes, I didn’t actually have to attend. I simply had to learn the material. This was a revolutionary discovery for me. Especially after my first year of college, which I thought was the most profound waste of my life I had ever experienced (from an educational perspective). To the point that I nearly dropped out.
I went to the only good college in NC that had a film school. And as I had been told by basically everyone since I was in middle school, “college is where you go to learn whatever you want! You get to choose!” This just sounded awesome to me. I could finally just pick what I wanted to learn about rather than being force fed a basket of crap that I generally found to be useless. In hindsight I can easily see that it was even worse than I had suspected. The overwhelming majority of my valuable “education” occurred through Science Olympiad competitions, rather than school itself.
Then I went to college…
My entire first year I got to “choose” which of my **generic required courses** I took and when. Basically like telling someone they are free and can be represented in govt by whoever they want, and then telling them their only choices are Kamala or Trump. Actually it’s worse than that, more like saying you have to choose BOTH Kamala and Trump, you only get to decide which order they will go in.
I was pissed. Like really pissed. The quintessential what-the-fuck-am-I-doing class was “orientation.” Which was the most made-up useless bunch of bullshit I had ever heard in my life. Our highest weighted grade was a JOURNAL that we had to do throughout the entire class. This was one of the classes I had first decided I simply wasn’t going to attend. I didn’t really understand what it meant that “I was paying for my college education,” but I did have enough of an idea that I refused to go to a class that I didn’t think I was getting anything out of. I was not happy.
I basically wrote as much in my “journal” that I had to do for the course. As we were supposed to turn it in for grading at the end of the semester, and I hadn’t done literally any of it, I had set out on the last night to fake a semester’s worth of journal entries… I was about half of ONE page in, when I realized how angry i was that I had to even FAKE care about this class. So I scratched out what I had written and proceeded to dump my frustrations into about a 3 page paper of why my time and money (as well as the professor who probably had something more useful to do) had been completely wasted by this class, how I felt cheated of something that I had actually wanted and forced to lie about a stupid journal, and how I felt deceived about what college even was.
This was the peak of my wondering if it was even worth it if I was just going to receive 4 years of “High School 2.0.”
Funny enough, he gave me full marks. I was never sure if it was because he read it and agreed, or if he thought it was all so pointless that he didn’t even bother turning the page to find out I hadn’t even done the assignment.
This is all a precursor to my mindset that led to the dream.
It wasn’t until my second year that I got my FIRST film class, and I made the decision to stick it out, as I was still somewhat trapped in the view that “if you didn’t go to college you were a failure.” And all I could see was everyone around me thinking I had gone from graduating 4th in my class to college dropout and “oh what happened to him.” So I stayed.
But it became commonplace for me to simply not attend classes I didn’t like: I attended maybe 1/4th of my economics class, and still made an A (even came super easy to me). I skipped almost every bit of my calculus class because I couldn’t understand a word of what my professor said anyway. Literally never had a good calculus teacher and that always annoyed me. I did ok but it was my first experience having to learn something super difficult entirely online in combo with my textbook (textbooks are literally awful teaching tools)… another thing that pissed me off with the vague idea that I was somehow paying a lot of money for this.
Because of this, I had some low, persistent, back-of-mind anxiety that I would literally forget that I was enrolled in a class. It wasn’t a huge fear, but it was something that was just persistent, like a tiny nudge every single day, “don’t forget you are technically taking an economics course and have to check in online to figure out if there are assignments or exams coming up.”
Needless to say, this strategy came with a few panic stricken “read 12 chapters of a textbook and learn an entire class worth of material in the next 48 hours” sprints. It wasn’t exactly the most stable and robust way to get passing grades… but it worked.
There were a few hiccups, but it basically all went good, and I actually loved my later years of film school and I’m happy I did it.
But I hadn’t realized how strong that little, never ending, anxiety weighing on my mind really was until a couple of years later…
Sometime after college I had the dream. It was very similar in thematic tone as the iconic, “I went to class naked” dream. But it was one where I had completely and utterly forgotten an entire class had even existed. I had apparently gone to the very first session, then decided to add it to my, not-attending list. And had never noticed the emails, never realized that I had missed it, had completely forgotten its existence for the entire semester.
Then on the day of the class’s final exam, I was casually strolling around campus certain that I was done with the semester… but SOMETHING was itching at me. One of those “did I leave the oven on” sorts of itching.
I ran into a friend who was chatting with someone about exams and overheard them mention it… it all came flooding back to me!!! I was mortified. I didn’t even know where the class was! So I immediately went on this panic driven fury of office searching, records digging, and email hunting. I found all of these “THIS IS YOUR FINAL NOTICE, IF YOU FAIL TO ATTEND YOU WILL BE KICKED OUT OF SCHOOL” emails that I completely missed. I was stuck in line at the records office, with some attendant moving slower than the court system. I’m desperately just trying to figure out what building and room number the course was even in. Who was my professor? Did I still have time!?
The panic was overwhelming. It was the culmination of all of the night-before-it’s-due papers, the never-studied-for exams, the assignments I had forgotten about and scrambled together. It was like everything about how I had pushed off, procrastinated, and squirmed my way through much of college had just been piling up in this forgotten corner of my mind that I was certain was just making it go away. But like a closet filled to the brim with crap you never dealt with, it was on the edge of bursting open.
Then somehow, years later, maybe I stashed away something random like ignoring my email and that happened to find its way into that same forgotten closet… and it was too much. YEARS of ignored anxiety smashed into me in this one dream.
I remember the building that this fake class was in. I remember what the hallway looked like. (Both were completely non-existent btw, it was actually a weird, mutated love child of one of the film buildings and my old high school) I remember sprinting across campus. I remember going down the wrong hall and having to turn around. I remember the labyrinth in the building as I tried to find the real room. I remember the look on the professor’s face as he saw “that student who ignored all my emails.” I remember begging him not to kick me out of school.
I remember the slow attendant at the records office, the friend I saw in the courtyard and who they were having a conversation with. I remember SO many things about this dream. I even had variations and odd half-continuations of the dream a few other times after the initial one.
Oddly enough, I can remember much of that dream more clearly than I even remember a lot of the ACTUAL courses and buildings i took classes in during college.
I awoke in such a panic that it literally kept creeping back into my mind all day that day. It was like tripping balls and then thinking you are sober, but then for 4 seconds about 2 hours later the walls are melting again. I had to actually keep reminding myself for hours and even days later that it *was not real* and I didn’t have this forgotten course that I had to sort out. “You’re not even in college anymore you idiot.”
To this day that feeling is still easy to bring back, and part of my mind still has this little piece that thinks I completely forgot an entire course and had to sort it out on the day of the exam. I know it’s not true, but it *felt* true. I imagine if I ever get dementia when I’m older I’ll tell my grandkids about it three times every visit like it actually happened and then asking if they’ve seen my grandparents new hardwood floors that I stained for them when I was 10 years old.
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I tell this story for two reasons, and it’s the main reason I still think about this from time to time:
1. The power of the mind is absolutely wild. This “memory” that I have, never actually happened. My feelings of it are totally invented. Yet it still has power like some crazy PTSD.
2. I think of this as the power of hiding/ignoring a small anxiety for a VERY long time. You eventually pay for it. That closet will one day explode open. It wasn’t avoided, only delayed. And this is also part of why telling the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable, is almost always the best course of action. Hiding minor conflicts rather than addressing them often has the exact same outcome at some point.
I guess the lesson here is to deal with your shit, don’t let small things fester, everything you think you “get away with” often still has a cost, and importantly, your feelings don’t equal reality. They may be trying to tell you something, but don’t confuse a strong feeling with the truth.
