Roo posted about his recurring nightmare, in which he stops attending one of his college classes and forgets all about it until it's time for midterms. Then fear, despair, waste, failure, all completely avoidable. It's apparently a pretty common dream. I used to have a variation of it all the time too, until it actually happened.
It was a media law class, an interesting enough topic, taught by a nice enough guy. But he taught word-for-word from the text, class after class, which drove me nuts. Fuck this, I thought after a few weeks, I know how to read. I was working full time and had plenty of other, more difficult classes to work on, so I hit on a brilliant solution: I would read the book and skip all the classes except for the test-review and test days.
You can see where this is going. I did well on every test up until the final and was confident of an easy A. There were about three weeks of classes between the last test and the final, so I busied myself with other projects, grateful for the extra time. I did a little reading for the last unit here and there but figured I'd save the real studying for after the review session. I was so proud to be gaming the system that whole semester. After all, wasn't that what college was really about?
Yeah, I'm smart. So goddamned smart that I showed up for the final review, ready to take copious notes, ace the final the next week, and proclaim my experiment an unqualified success. But something wasn't right. Why was everyone frantically consulting flashcards? Why were they sharpening their No. 2 pencils? Oh. My. Fuuuuuck.
At some point in the previous three weeks, the class had voted to throw out the syllabus, move the final up a week, and finish the class early. Of course I didn't know about it. I wasn't there.
I'd had this exact thing happen to me so many times in a dream that it took me several seconds to realize that it really was happening. But it was true, I had to take the final cold. I sat there blankly for several minutes while a terrible chill traveled up and down from my neck to my asshole, coming to rest somewhere in my large intestine long enough for me to randomly pick some multiple-choice answers and scribble a few vague replies. It was even worse than I'd dreamed; in a nightmare you don't actually have to take the damn test.
I got a 30-something on the exam. Fortunately, that was enough for me to pass the class. My grade point average suffered a little, but really, it wasn't that big a deal, except for that nasty chill and the sting of having my tremendous smugness punctured and ground into a sad little paste. At the very least, I haven't had that awful dream since.
Now I believe if I could just win the lottery, have all my teeth fall out at once, and witness a plane crashing into the side of a mountain, my recurring dream problem would be completely taken care of.