Back-to-School nights.

What is the combination?  WHAT is the combination?  I don’t remember what the combination was, I haven’t had this locker in over twenty years, why should I remember the combination!?!

I should explain that I’m experiencing my annual “back-to-school” dreams.  Or maybe they’d be considered nightmares.   After all, I’m expected to remember the locker combination from 1988 or I’m supposed to know the code to enter my dorm room dating back to 1995.

I’m late for the first day of school.  Why didn’t my mom wake me up?  Which house is this anyways and to which school am I supposed to be going?

This is another classic part of those dreams.  I don’t remember where I live, what house I’m living in, or what school I’m attending.

Once I do get there, all the teachers and classmates are mixed up, too, though now I can blame Facebook for this aspect of the dreams.  I’ll see an elementary school friend in a high school gym class or I’ll be trying to remember that darn locker combination from sixth grade while standing next to the boy whose locker was near mine for two years in high school.

I never took Spanish!  I nearly failed calculus, why am I being subjected to it again?  Diagramming sentences?  Seriously?

The classes make no sense.  I took years and years of German, I’ll never touch math again if I can help it, and while I find that diagramming sentences did make me a grammar nerd, I could do without actually having to perform that particular task now that I am 33 years old.

Most importantly, I don’t understand why I have these dreams for a week or two every single August.  I haven’t stepped foot inside a classroom in over four years.   I’m not entirely interested in returning to school for a graduate degree or certificate, only because I don’t have a clue what I would want out of it.

While I still fantasize about that masters of fine arts in creative writing or begin to consider the more practical accounting information systems master’s program at a nearby state school, I don’t know that I want to make the effort at this point in my life or that I want to finalize any one direction my life could take.  (After all, I put my eggs all in one basket by quitting my job and pursuing my nursing pre-requisites a few years ago, only to discover that I was still too close to the patient experience to become a nurse.)

Could it be that my subconscious noticed last week while I flipped through the catalog full of continuing education courses offered at our local community college?  Did it notice that beginner Italian class or that Quickbooks series or maybe even the travel writing seminar?  Or perhaps it noticed how much I enjoyed challenging my mind and my beliefs while reading The End of the Affair by Graham Greene, wishing I could discuss with others who felt enlightened by the same novel?

Or maybe it just proves that I experience anxiety in the dream state, too.  I’ve had other recurring dreams, one in particular where I desperately try to return to my childhood home and keep finding obstacles along the way.

Or heck, I don’t know, maybe dreams are just full of crap.