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Friday, January 11, 2008
Must be Dreaming
Morning! I recently had dinner with a friend who is - as I suspect are many of our readers - 8-9 months away from beginning a tenure-track position as a prawf. She told me that she had her first anxiety dream about teaching a class. She told me this not to elicit sympathy, but to let me know that she had undergone a particular rite of passage marking her transformation from student to teacher. I reacted to her news the way I suspect she suspected I would: I laughed, rolled my eyes, and assured her that her dream would be the first in a series of anxiety dreams of this new genre.
When I went to elementary school here and to high school here , I would dream regularly that I had mistakenly worn pants to school; my dreams involved running from rabbis in hallways and, in high school, riding elevators to avoid them, so that I wouldn't get expelled for violating the dress code. In college, I enjoyed a series of more conventional anxiety dreams, often appearing unclothed in public places and taking final exams for the wrong courses in buildings on the other side of campus. As a law student, I woke up more than once relieved to remember that class participation only marginally affected my grade; in my dreams, I was always on call and was never prepared.
I don't remember the plot of my very first anxiety dream about teaching. I do know, however, that since December 3, 2005 (the day I got my offer from Hofstra), my dreams have involved teaching a class whose subject matter was entirely unfamiliar to me, defending a paper in a faculty workshop that I had not written, and my favorite (and most recent), receiving an email (sent to multiple recipients) from a colleague attaching a political cartoon through which the colleague expressed the colleague's displeasure with me.
And those are just a few. I tend to experience the highest concentration of anxiety dreams right before a new semester begins, as I am drafting a final exam, before a speaking engagement, or before submitting a paper . . . so, I guess, sensibly, I have anxiety dreams when I am anxious. For those of you who miss reading this column, help others fill the gap that YM Magazine left and use the comments to say anything. It's just a dream.
Posted by Liz Glazer on January 11, 2008 at 09:58 AM | Permalink
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Over at Prawfsblawg, Liz Glazer has a post about the transition new professors experience from anxiety dreams about being a student (the math class you haven't attended all semester) to anxiety dreams about teaching. Although I have been teaching for... [Read More]
Tracked on Jan 11, 2008 3:28:37 PM
Comments
My first five years or more of teaching, at the beginning of each semester I would have a dream that I had been cast in a play (I did a bit of acting in high school and college, but none since); the first performance of the play was that night; but I had never bothered to learn my lines. It's the only recurring dream I've ever had in my life.
Posted by: Joseph Slater | Jan 11, 2008 10:14:11 AM
Liz, my first teaching anxiety dream was about scholarship. In between taking the job at Drexel and starting it, I dreamed that I "found" a paper I had written but then somehow had lost. The paper was on Burke. About what exactly I don't remember, but I do remember waking up and thinking -- "I have a paper ready to go! Hooray! Where is it?!?" And then after a few minutes of mental searching, realizing the prospective publication was only a dream. Sigh.
Posted by: Chapin Cimino Cody | Jan 11, 2008 11:20:25 AM
I have a reoccurring dream that I cannot find my classroom. The type of anxiety dream that combines my complex about my seriously bad sense of direction with my fear of being unprepared. Sometimes, in a variation on that dream, I also can’t find proper attire and I am looking for the classroom in a baseball hat, gym clothes and sneakers (or pajamas or no clothing at all). I suppose that’s the way I work through my complex about having an inept sartorial sense.
Posted by: Meredith R. Miller | Jan 11, 2008 2:39:37 PM
In my dream the other night I had to teach a property class while eating a pastrami sandwhich. Seems like an intersectionality anxiety dream--classes starting up again and my ongoing anxiety about being a Jewish vegetarian in the south. At the time it reminded me of the Seinfeld episode where George tries to integrate food into his sex life.
Posted by: Zak Kramer | Jan 11, 2008 4:10:49 PM
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