Dreamin'

Now the story can be told.

Well, maybe not. 

Anyway, here goes. Once upon a time, I had a dream. One of those. A really big time "one-of-those." A dream like none-other-in-my-life kind of dream. There's a woman, a girl. Worse, she was a student of mine. I don't remember her name. Don't even remember her face. All I remember is the girl was my student. 

I woke up embarrassed. Seriously. I was. I woke up ashamed to have been the me in the dream. It was that vivid.

I was regretfully single back then, it was my first year of teaching, and my prep time each day was first hour. Right next door to my room stood the school library, so I wandered over because that scorching x-rated thing haunted me. I wanted to have a look at what Freud thought about dreams. All of this happened in ye olden days, pre-Wikipedia. Steve Jobs was still in high school. Some guy at Iowa State had a computer, but it was big as an armory. You had to look things up.

Mrs. Lancaster wasn't there, the school librarian. The place was empty. Perfect.

So there I was with my finger in the page on Freud and repression, when guess who walked in? 

That girl. 

True story.

Waaaaaaay too much guilt for a Calvinist to take. That's why it took a half century to tell.

Just a couple nights ago, I woke up in the middle of another dream, a whole new genre. The dreams I remember tend to be as genre-driven as romance novels, basically identical narrative lines, same old/same old. In one of them, I'm horrifically without a pants. You know. Don't know how I got the bare bottom, but I'm a gym-full of screaming fans away from the closest pair of Hanes or a towel or horse blanket. "Buck Naked schivies," Duluth Trading Post'll sell me. Maybe you've seen 'em. Scary. 

But the dream a couple nights ago was a new story. I was someplace high above, not out of touch but somehow out of reach. What happened was my family--not my kids, but my parents and sisters--were having a ball, a picnic maybe without me. I wasn't invited. They didn't tell me what they were doing; they just went ahead and had a reunion or something without me. I got left on some shelf. Very sad. Nobody said it, but I think it had to do with politics. 

And there's another one I'm stuck on. If my dreams were on a library shelf, there'd be endless spines with this one, more every week. I FORGOT SOMETHING. I'm somewhere, anywhere, and I forgot something and, try as I might, I can't reverse gears, go back, and get there. I'm simply going to miss whatever I was supposed to do because I just plain forgot. The specs don't matter, really, all I know is that I should have been some place and the whole frickin' business slipped my mind, should have but forgot and simply can't swim upstream. 

Am I alone with this one? Maybe. I'm scheduled to speak at some church or something, but I'm at Walmart or downtown or at my office and I can't get there. Drives me nuts, but I'm in a lake of pea soup I can't wade through so I just can't get where I'm supposed to be.

There's a refrain in this one, a chorus that's composed of a single word:  "AGAIN, Schaap?"

Or is that dream reality?  Can't tell really.

All I know is it's got nothing to do with repression, Sigmund. Happens all the time.