A meaningful dream

So I guess it is no surprise to anyone that my anxiety levels are through the roof right now. It is kind of amazing when I get this stressed. I sleep poorly, eat badly and when I do eat I find myself having microwaved pancakes at two in the afternoon. I have no idea why that is always the case. Apparently I find that pancakes are the cure to my anxiety. Serves about as good of a purpose as the medication I take for it to begin with.

Anyway, so with this much stress going through me it was expected that my stress dream would return. It was the same one that it always was; I am in school (high school this time around) faced with tests or papers that I haven’t prepared for in the least. Typically the test is in a day or two and I simply haven’t prepared. Last night was a first though. The chemistry test was sitting on the desk in front of me and I had not studied in the least.

Now let’s analyze that part. How apropos is that development? To show that I am at a point in my life where I need to make a decision the dream test is no longer a theoretical test in the future (where I know that with an hour or two of prep I could make a good showing). It is now sitting there in front of me and I have to answer it. I have to take pencil to paper and face the unknown.

So how did I address the situation in my dream? Well, here is where it gets freaky. See, there were two parts of me in the dream. There was my dream self (who was twelve years old for some reason that maybe Freud could explain) and then my real self. My dream self acted first and simply handed in the test blank. My real self saw the flaw in that and (after merging with my dream self. Again, it was pretty freaky) went up to the teacher, said I just lost it for the moment and go the paper back. Then I started to work on it only to notice that my calculator wasn’t working.

What does this mean? Well, maybe handing in a test blank is a sign of my inability to make a decision. Part of me would rather hand in the test and avoid the decision and take failure over the challenge of the unknown. But my rational side knows that is wrong and will risk embarrassment to try to do my best in any situation. My broken calculator has two very simple explanations. The first is that I am missing a few key pieces of information in my decision and I find it impossible to make a good decision until I have those pieces (emphasized by the fact that my calculator was actually missing keys). The other reason is that in reality the batteries have died on my HP calculator and I should probably get that fixed.

How does the dream end? How does one finish a chemistry test without a calculator? I came up with a pretty simple and ingenious solution. I showed all the work without making a single calculation and then stated that it was my religious belief that certain problems just cannot be solved on paper. Valid answer, right?

That might be the best explanation of where I stand right now. I have reached a decision point but my calculator is missing keys and I’m not nearly as prepared as I would like to be. But at some point I am going to do my best and hope that whoever is running the show guides me in the right direction. Maybe if I have my mind set in that way my anxiety will lessen, I will get some sleep, and return to being me for a change.