My dreams aren’t as bad as Scrooge’s, but they’re tiresome…
Remember, when I told you I was taking a linguistics course this semester, I expressed the hope that it would have a secondary benefit?
Perhaps I can even do well enough to put an end to those dreams. You know, the ones in which you have to go take your exam at the end of a term, and you suddenly realize that you have no idea where the class meets, because you haven’t attended it even once. You’d meant to, but somehow never got around to it.
Well… that might have been a wish too far. I’ve had variations on that dream twice in the past week. The first one had an interesting twist.
In that one, there was an awareness that I’m actually currently taking a course, and doing pretty well at it — which is the way I’d describe how things have been going in this linguistics course. So the dream began with a “this is working as hoped” sort of vibe.
But then I experienced that evil moment common to these dreams — the point at which I am suddenly reminded that I’m actually taking a full load, and while I’ve been engaging this one course fairly well, it has caused me to completely forget the other four or so. I say “four or so” because I absolutely couldn’t find the slip of paper (like the kind we might have had in the ’70s) that listed the courses, the professors, and times and locations. Like this one, although I seemed to remember the one in the dream as being neatly printed, with no handwritten entries.
In the dream, it was a Monday, and in the real world my classes are on Tuesdays and Thursdays — but now I felt sure that I had classes, maybe two or three of them, on Mondays. And I had never been to them, and had no idea where they were, and I was panicking.
There was no resolution of this problem, of course. That’s one of the rules in this sort of dream.
The second dream was less interesting — just a standard “panicking because I’ve never been to class” dream, with no reference to the one course I’m actually taking.
So maybe I’m not going to get that side benefit. I’ll just have to be satisfied with learning stuff. And I am.
And it’s stuff that I wanted to learn (or some of it is — this being an intro course, there’s a lot of material from sub-fields aside from the stuff I like, but that’s fine). These last weeks — since this post about accents — have been very good. The next week we were on language change — things such as why Beowolf was so different from Shakespeare, and why so many can’t understand Shakespeare today. And this week we’re doing names — looking at given names in various languages, the development of surnames in various cultures in recent centuries, and so forth. Good stuff, if you’re me and you have a family tree with 10,000 people on it — so far.
Just four classes left — today, Thursday, and the two next week. And I have part of a project due Friday, and the full project due a few days after the last class.
In my slacker days…
So. I plan to enjoy these last days, and do well on the project, and get a good grade. Maybe then the Superintendent of Dreams will decide that I’m no longer the slacker I was back in the early ’70s, and he can give me a break on the stress dreams. After all, aside from grades, I’ve made it to every class — although I might be a bit late today (but it’s excused).
Maybe. But I suspect those dreams are just a fact of life. I’ll just have to be satisfied with having learned things I wanted to know about. That will be sufficient reward…
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