Summer dreams make me feel....

Last night I had the stress dream.

I stood at the front of an unfamiliar classroom, with dozens of students facing me.  Their sour faces condemned me from the moment they plopped into their seats.  They could see right through my sham. I had nothing.  Nothing to share, nothing to assign. 

All I could say was, “I thought they said school started on JULY 29, not JUNE 29.”  As if that mattered. In that moment.

I’ve started doing the hair thing, too.  In the middle of the night, I run my fingers through my hair.  They start at the base of my skull, then slowly follow my scalp to the crown of my head.  There they wiggle through sections of my hair, like some animated version of the 1970's electric hair detangler I used after shampooing my long hair in high school. 

After several passes, Jerry firmly grabs my hand and places it by my side, and on some level of consciousness, I stop because I know I have interrupted his precious sleep.

My ultimate stress scenario hasn't manifested in recent days, thank goodness.   

I am standing at my locker at Yorktown Middle School.  A sense of dread fills me, as I know that the bell will ring at any moment.  And there in the empty hall, I stand twirling the lock, first right, then left, then right.  I'm flipping through my mind for the right numbers and the correct sequence.  I feel the ridges in the black knob dig into my fingertips as I twirl faster.  An invisible clock ticks down the seconds.  I cannot be late.  I cannot be late.  The bell will ring any second. But the numbers just are not there. Panic fills my throat.

At other times, I enter the elevator to go to class in the ten-story tall Teachers College on the BSU campus, one of the few buildings at the time of my undergraduate days that had an elevator for students to use.  I step into the small pod, often with another unknown person.  As the doors close, I immediately sense something is not right.  On cue, the pod blasts straight up through the shaft and terrifyingly into the air above the building, a la Charlie Bucket’s adventure, but without the comfort of chocolate.  Or it lurches laterally, in a sci-fi movie effect that I knew is going to end in disaster.   

Sometimes, even though I have entered on the ground floor, the  elevator drops hundreds of feet in excruciating slow motion, and I know that there is no hope for my survival.

I guess it’s that time of summer again.

The time when, even though over the years I have faced countless students in English classes, bunches of terrified novice swimmers at summer camp, scads of teachers in professional development programs, and even flocks of church members from a couple of pulpits, I start to get panicky.

I begin to wonder, at least in my sleep, how can I get everything accomplished.  How can I have positive time for myself and my family and be prepared for new students and classes?  How can I make this list get smaller instead of longer?

Maybe the answers are in my dreams.