Waking Up

I'm trying to wake up.  I can't get the cobwebs to clear away this morning despite application of Diet Mountain Dew.  This is probably because of the freaking bizarre dreams I had all night.

They were mostly school related.  It doesn't take a genius to tell I'm anxious about going back.

I dreamed I had a room full of things other teachers had been looking for but that I had somehow overlooked and had not given to them, thus failing in one of my supervisory capabilities. Somehow their stuff had gotten mixed in with my stuff, and I had not found it.  They had needed it, asked for it, but I hadn't found it in time.

I dreamed that they asked me to move my classroom again.  This time, impossibly, the move was somehow to the room my old AP teacher from high school had.  I do not teach at the same school I attended, yet, somehow, by the magic of dreams, the two schools melded together, and I could walk down the stairs, turn a corner, and there was a version of that room, that hall there.  I do not even know what to make of that.

As I was trying to move my stuff, I dreamed that students from last year showed up to take an exam they claimed they had missed. They had been told they were permitted to take it now.  They did not understand  the material, and they sat in front of the test blankly for a long time.  They just became shadows in the desks.

I also came downstairs with a load of stuff and was for some reason outside in a courtyard area our school does not have but my old high school does, and a principal I had never seen came running past me on a walkie-talkie (all the admins at our schools carry these) with a set of keys.  He went to the door I was using and he locked it.  Then he came back to me, telling me he'd locked the building down and that it was my responsibility to find a way to get back in.  He walked off even though I was standing there with my arms loaded.

The scene switched and for some reason I was having my AP class on a football practice field.  I had all my stuff in a car.  I was missing half of my class.  I had no idea where they were.  I had all these kids in my room that I had never seen before who were earnestly scribbling things down.  At the end of the period, one of these kids I didn't know (he looked like he was about 12) came up and asked me for an essay topic handout to take with him.  He said that all my other kids were in the gym at a protest because the coaches were trying to cut a kid off the track team midseason and they felt like this was unfair.  The students I didn't know had been sent to cover their classes during the protest.  It was a system they'd worked out.

It just kept getting progressively stranger.  I finally got in my "new" classroom.  I had windows on both sides of the room, even the one with the interior hallway.  I could see the mountains of Japan out the hallway side....  People I know, colleagues, friends, former students, people dead and gone, dropped in and out of this thing like it was a major motion picture.  It was not a horror movie because there were no monsters or gore, but I have rarely felt so glad to wake up or so happy to be in my own little bedroom when I did.

I hate it when my brain gets cute with the things I'm worried about.  I can trace back a lot of what I saw.  Not all of it, but much of it. I miss harmless dreaming.