Academic Nightmares

I was highly amused by Eugene's nightmare about law school, because I've been having similar dreams for years.

Usually, the dream involves the discovery that I neglected to take a necessary course (or exam) at some point in my educational history, and I have to complete it now or else see all my subsequent educational achievements unravel. Sometimes these dreams go back to grad school, other times back to college, occasionally as far back as high school. In one extreme case -- in a dream that was like a parody of the others -- I had to go back to *first grade* to complete a reading course. So I ended up wedging my adult frame into one of those little first-grader-sized desks, while the teacher called on me and my 6-year-old classmates to read aloud from a book with colorful pictures and words in 16-point font.