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Traum time

Regular readers are aware (probably all too aware) that I’ve been flogging my forthcoming book, What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? (W. W. Norton, this September) over the past year or so.  I’ve been dropping dark hints about critiques of postmodernism here and Horowitzian smear campaigns there, suggesting that my footnotes will be explosive and that no one will remain seated during the thrilling final ten pages.  And for good reason!  I’m just waiting for Paul Haggis to pick up the film rights, and then it’s Oscar City for my little book, folks.

But I haven’t done quite as thorough a job of flogging my other forthcoming book, Rhetorical Occasions (University of North Carolina Press, this fall).  And you know how I hate to fall down in the all-important “Most Relentlessly Self-Promoting” Koufax category.  So, then, with gracious permission from my editor at UNC Press, here’s one of the thirty-something old, new, bloggy, and revised-and-updated essays that will appear in Rhetorical Occasions.  A slightly different version of it appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education four and a half years ago.

________

It’s the class of my dreams. We’re just beginning a new semester; I’m going over the syllabus, term papers, midterm, final, and so on when, suddenly, a secretary pops her head in the door to say that the class has been moved to a different building, effective immediately.  Puzzled, my students and I gather our bags and belongings and begin the hike to Zzyzzych 304, a room in a building none of us has ever heard of.  It’s about a 20-minute walk, and, before long, almost half the students disappear.  I begin to get worried and start talking to the remaining students about the assigned novelists and poets, trying to keep them entertained; that works for a while, until we enter a construction site and find ourselves shuffling through a makeshift plywood corridor whose ceiling seems to be getting lower as we go.  More students bail out.  By the time we reach the dank basement entrance to the Zzyzzych Building, I’m left with a class of twelve students, eight or nine of whom leave while I’m discussing the grading policy.

Another tableau:  I wander into the English Department office as the semester begins to find that my course on 20th-century African-American fiction, meeting later that day, has been changed to “Avant-Garde and Representation:  The Problem of the Holocaust.” I have no syllabus; nor do I know anything about the topic.  Nevertheless, terrified as I am, I manage to bluff my way through the first class meeting by asking students for their reactions to Schindler’s List.  Thankfully, they are less annoyed by my incompetence than by the fact that the classroom has window ledges seven feet high—and no chairs.

Anyone who’s had an anxiety dream about teaching knows the psychic landscape:  the mysterious building, the spectral students, the surreal classroom, the sheer suffocating terror.  This is the class that will expose me as a fraud, you think.  Or: This time they’ll know I didn’t prepare all summer.  Even: When this is over, they’ll fire me on the spot.  From what all my friends and colleagues tell me, it doesn’t matter how experienced or accomplished you are: if you care at all about your teaching, you are haunted by teaching-anxiety dreams.

They come in all genres and feature all forms of torment, and they afflict graduate students and emeriti alike.  My wife, Janet Lyon, despite having won numerous teaching awards, begins each year with some variation on a dream in which she walks into the room, discovers that she must lecture to 500 students on a short story she’s never read, and promptly pretends to faint at the lectern.

And then there are the related anxiety dreams, so often triggered by the advent of classes, in which you imagine yourself back in college under some terrible dispensation—you have to write 100 pages by dawn to graduate; you’re told on the eve of your Ph.D. orals that your B.A. has been investigated and found to be invalid. I’m sorry, intones the lugubrious, 16-rpm voice, you will have to leave the graduate program by midnight tonight. Bats whirl in the light of the moon as the ancient clock on the quad strikes 11.

That last nightmare (minus the bats and the tolling bell) was actually related to me by the late W.T.H. Jackson, the renowned medievalist, whom few colleagues would have suspected of a moment’s doubt about his skills or his credentials.  It was May 1982, and I, then a senior at Columbia University, had appeared at Jackson’s door in the kind of cold sweat that one associates with . . . well, with nightmares.  I was frantically explaining to him that the R (for “residence credit") that he had given me in his class on Tristan and Isolde was preventing me from graduating.  “I’m not a graduate student,” I said, “and I can’t take classes for R credit, and the registrar’s computer reads it as an F, and my parents are flying in at 4, and. . . .” Professor Jackson graciously explained that he had mistakenly given my B+ to some bewildered graduate student and given me her R.  Then he told me that, without a doubt, this experience would stay with me the rest of my life if I pursued a career in academe, where I would periodically dream that someone would declare my B.A. invalid and fire me on the spot.  He knew.  He’d had the dream many times.

In my case, you see, anxiety dreams are kind of like conspiracy theories—every once in a while, they have a basis in fact.  Remember that dream about the course you didn’t know you were taking and, therefore, didn’t go to all semester?  That’s the Ghost Course dream.  I have it three or four times every year, just as classes begin.

About half the time, it’s the foreign-language requirement that gets me.  Sure, sometimes I dream that I’m supposed to be taking Geology 801 or Intro Entymology or some other subject of which I have remained almost completely ignorant my entire life, but most of the time the Ghost Course concerns a subject close to me—and yet not close enough.  French is a perfect psychic magnet for my free-floating sense of inadequacy.  It doesn’t help matters that I really did fail my second semester of French as a college sophomore, because I transferred from one section to another without completing the appropriate forms:  I signed up for a 9 am section, then got a job cleaning a local restaurant from 7-11 am weekdays, then switched to the 11 am section without properly dropping the 9 am section.  I finally got the F removed, although not before spending the spring semester on academic probation.

The experience might have been mildly traumatic—particularly for a 19-year-old who had spent most of his conscious life jumping through the requisite academic hoops, usually with the greatest of ease.  But why should I replay it over and over in my dreams to this day? Why should it be linked to the start of classes?  And why do I bother obsessing about little anxieties of 20 years ago, instead of about the much greater ones that have dotted my adult life since?  I’m actually not terribly worried about academic matters in my waking life.  Bad book reviews, rejected fellowship applications, stinging student evaluations—those are annoying or discouraging, no question.  But one severely asthmatic, repeatedly hospitalized toddler, then another child with Down syndrome, now that’s serious.

Or so one would think, in one’s waking moments.  The unconscious, however, has a mind of its own.  And so every semester, when anxiety strikes in the still of the night, I don’t dream that I have to cancel a class because of my children; no, I dream that my course descriptions have been changed, that my students get up and drift away as I’m in midsentence, that I’m three hours late to a classroom that doesn’t exist—or that I forgot to attend “French for Reading Proficiency” last term and will not be allowed to teach the novels of André Gide.  I’ve never taught the novels of André Gide.  But it doesn’t matter; there’s something about teaching that rouses all the gnawing fears that have accumulated over our academic lifetimes.

My dreams during the summer of 2001, as I was changing institutions, were particularly intense.  For the first time in twelve years, I really didn’t have any idea where my classrooms would be, and I really hadn’t filled out the book-order forms for my contemporary American literature courses.  I arrived at Penn State with much to learn, threading my way through what seemed to be an especially opaque and unnavigable campus.  Many things about Pennsylvania are opaque and unnavigable—it appears to be impossible to register a motor vehicle in the commonwealth, for example, without a blood test and a note from your college French teacher—but my unconscious worries about moving to a new place seemed to concentrate exclusively on what would happen on the first day of classes.

As I prepared my opening handouts, unaware that the English department was changing my office phone number (they eventually changed it twice), and that I’d forgotten to include Flannery O’Connor on the survey syllabus (now, how did that happen?), I realized why professors have anxiety dreams at the start of the academic year: teaching is really hard to do.  If you’re doing it in classes of 15 and 40 students, as I am, you’re teaching in a setting where the students will find out not only what you think about x and y, but also what you are like, in some strange and intimate way.  They’ll get a sense of how thoroughly you prepare, of course, but, even more, they’ll see how you respond to the unexpected—to the savvy young woman who wants to know whether you’re using the term “postcolonial” in a cultural or an economic sense, to the curious junior who wonders aloud why Don DeLillo gave the name Simeon Biggs to a snappish African-American character in Underworld. For such moments, you simply can’t prepare—except by accumulating years upon years of teaching experience, and weathering night upon night of anxiety dreams.

Because on that first day of class, truly anything can happen:  your students aren’t going to love you just because your last three semesters went well, and it’s a fair bet that none of your undergraduates (and almost none of your graduate students) will have come back from the summer freshly impressed by how deftly you handled that ludicrously unfair book review in the June issue of Crank Quarterly. Amazingly, none of your students will arrive on the first day having heard anything you’ve said to other students over the past twenty years; amazingly, you’ll have to make a first impression all over again, for the twenty-first time.

If it’s a course you’ve never taught before, you may wind up rewriting or scrapping the syllabus in midstream; if it’s a course in a fairly new area of study, you’ll have no idea what kind of knowledge base to expect from your students.  And, of course, if the window ledges are seven feet high in Zzyzzych 304, how will anyone be able to close the windows when the motorcycle gangs roar by?

Buddhists speak of learning to see the world with “beginner’s mind,” and that’s precisely what you have to do every semester:  begin again, from scratch, knowing that anything can happen—seeing those 10, or 50, or even 500 students, like the 2,000 students you’ve seen before, with beginner’s mind.  Our anxiety dreams, surely, are the index of our secret fears of failure and inadequacy.  But they’re also the measure of how very difficult it is—and how very exhilarating—to begin each semester with beginner’s mind.

Posted by on 03/14 at 11:47 AM

  1. Michael,

    Posted by  on  03/14  at  01:20 PM

  2. Sure, the first time I leave a substantive comment, I screw it up.  Anyway, thanks for the essay.  As a starting professor, it’s nice to hear this from someone who has been around a while.  No matter how (relatively) easy the rest of my professional life has been, teaching will always engender a special level of anxiety because it is, at its heart, a performance.  And no matter how many times you perform, you always know that this could be the time that you bomb.  You describe the thought process perfectly.  I don’t know whether to be happy that others share this anxiety, or apprehensive that it will never go away, no matter how long I do this.

    Posted by  on  03/14  at  01:25 PM

  3. I found that after I intentionally showed up to a talk without my pants, the dreams went away. Also, the talk invitations.

    On a related note, Michael, have you thought about changing the blog name to Pajamas Media?

    Posted by  on  03/14  at  02:12 PM

  4. Ah, but how tall are the URINALS in your oneiric classroom? A good Professor-Anxiety dream always has the professor silently worrying if his students will ask him why the classroom is lined with urinals. And if they are giant, oversized urinals, whose troughs are chest level, so much the better!

    Posted by  on  03/14  at  02:16 PM

  5. I’ve had a lot of those dreams, and I’m not in academia. Notification that someone checking through old records at either my high school or college has discovered that I missed some required course for graduation, and that I am required to go back and take either something utterly stupid (a half credit of gymn) or something I know I wouldn’t have a chance in hell in passing, particularly at this point in my life (anything to do with higher mathematics, for instance).

    Posted by  on  03/14  at  02:49 PM

  6. I love those giant, oversized, chest-level urinals.  I will have to make an unconscious mental note to incorporate them into my next anxiety dream, together with student questions about why the classroom acoustics are so bad and the nagging worry that I need a half-credit in phys. ed.

    F, I believe mathpants has the solution for all of us.  We need to show up for class in our blogging clothes, that is, our pajamas.

    Posted by  on  03/14  at  03:03 PM

  7. It was particularly encouraging for me to read this entry just minutes after guiding a spectacularly mediocre discussion on Phillis Wheatley’s “To Maecenas,” handing back graded essays, and talking to distraught students about why they didn’t receive A’s.

    Posted by e. fiction  on  03/14  at  03:04 PM

  8. What about those out of body moments mid-lecture when you can hear your voice, and *everything* you are saying seems like so much gibberish?  As a lowly adjunct in a rut of survey classes (art history—Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern in a semester WAAA HOOOO!!!) I have moments of inner panic when I can’t remember if I told class A, B or C the “antipasto” v. “contrapposto” joke.  Though your post is about dreams, it is consoling to know that even an International Professor of Danger still worries about teaching (or is it inculcating/indocrinating?).

    Posted by  on  03/14  at  03:22 PM

  9. I once managed, in an anxiety dream, to explain that I had already graduated.  John G. Kemeny, the college President in my era, showed up to explain that no, I still had to take the exam.

    It was a Marshall McLuhan/Woody Allen moment.  Evil subconscious.

    Posted by Jonquil  on  03/14  at  03:34 PM

  10. Is Intro Entymology where you learn the history of names of insects?

    Posted by  on  03/14  at  03:43 PM

  11. Michael;
    Thanks for the essay.  Yes, teaching is hard work. I do think that junior never does have anxiety dreams.  These all seem familiar and I have had others walking into a classroom and discover that I am teaching a math class.  I know nothing of math.  i guess one never gets rid of high school, colege and grad school dreams.  and of course disappearing pants dreams.  Is this the academic condition?

    Posted by  on  03/14  at  05:02 PM

  12. I’ve had a strange variation on the Ghost Class dream.  For many years, it was set in high school.  Then, once, the dream involved not showing up for a semester of high school physics and being told about the midterm.  As it happened, when I actually took high school physics, I had blown off much of the first semester, and, in a panic before the mid-term, crammed for four days, taught myself a semester’s worth of the subject, and got a B, which, all things considered, was satisfactory.  In the dream, I somehow realized that I’d get through this.  In my real life, a pressing problem soon cleared up as well.  The next time I had the Ghost Course dream, I was no longer in high school, but in college.  I usually have the Ghost Course dream when I’m facing a real-life problem for which I’m unprepared.  After I work through the real-life problem, I get “promoted” in the next Ghost Course dream.  Now I’m in law school.  What? I’m taking Admiralty?

    Posted by  on  03/14  at  05:30 PM

  13. Michael,

    As a first-year TA with my own class, syllabus, etc., I really can’t tell you the relief I felt reading this.  Even though I’ve spent roughly a third of my life in higher ed., even though I’d had some teaching experience, even though, even though, even though ... walking into the classroom for the first time last fall was one of the most truamatic moments I’ve had in a long while.

    I think the thing that freaked me out the most was the fact that for an hour and 15 minutes, I was utterly alone.  If something went heywire, if I didn’t—God forbid—know something, there was no backup.  And, of course, the fact that I was an utter fraud didn’t help matters.

    It was good to hear that this, like sadness, comes in waves, and the waves just keep coming.

    Thanks,
    Scott

    Posted by SW  on  03/14  at  05:52 PM

  14. Harh! I never thought I’d have a chance to slip this dream into the conversation, but here goes:

    The day before my very first day of teaching, way back almost 10 years ago during the first MA, I had a dream in which everytime I opened my mouth to speak, the students each produced a fork and knife and began pounding on their desks. When I stopped talking, they put away the tableware. This repeated itself, oh, about 10 times before I woke up in a cold sweat, &c.

    Fact is, that quarter (it was a quarter system there at Merely Decent State U: ick) was a disaster, and I still have waking nightmares of regret about what a lousy teacher I was. Now I mostly get “fair, hard grader, nerdy (or “goofy")": that I can take.

    Posted by  on  03/14  at  07:43 PM

  15. My teaching anxiety dreams usually take the form of actually giving the lecture over and over during my dream. I wake up exhausted but my lectures are usually fairly well polished at that point. I have a recurring dream where I have to go back to high school to finish. At some point in the dream, when I have to do some stupid assignment, I cry out, “fuck this, I have a Ph.D.” and walk out.

    When I was in grad school I made extra money by tutoring. One day this guy calls me and says this is DOCTOR Smith (he always insisted on being called Dr) and I am looking for a tutor for general (freshman) chemistry. I asked him if it was for his child and he said no, he was a chiropractor and that his undergraduate school was not accredited and he was required to go back and re-take some classes, including gen chem so he could keep his chiropractor license. So here’s a true life version of the “have to go back” dream! Anyway on the second or third meeting I was explaining pH and I said that the pH is the negative log of the hydrogen ion concentration and DOCTOR Smith looks at me and says log? what’s that?

    I never saw him again after that.

    Posted by  on  03/14  at  07:56 PM

  16. the students each produced a fork and knife and began pounding on their desks

    ...and then there’s the dream where I violate every grammatical rule I try to get my students to follow. Good night and good luck everyone.

    Posted by  on  03/14  at  08:05 PM

  17. Well, at least there’s a name for that dream I keep having.

    I graduated almost 3 years ago, and I still have the Ghost Course dream.  I’m not even in academia anymore and my work has nothing to do with academia, but I still wake up in cold sweats after realizing that I’m four tests and three 20-page papers behind in a class that I’ve never attended.  The worst part is that in my dream, I had made a conscious decision to cut class, so it really is my fault.

    Posted by  on  03/14  at  08:40 PM

  18. OK, but I had the nightmare actually happen to me:

    I was teaching my very first intro fiction class ever, only having ever taught one course by myself, and that in my specialty.  The very first book on my syllabus is Native Son, which I read for my orals ages ago, and so I prepped from my copy.  The very first question from my fall semester freshmen is from this guy who turns out to be the smartest kid in the class, hands down.  He says, so what’s with the masturbation scene?  OK, there wasn’t any masturbation scene in the book *I* read.  So I think, rapid-fire: maybe he’s taunting me, maybe I’m crazy, maybe he’s an amazing reader of subtle symbolism.  I take a deep breath and gamble and say, “That is such a complicated scene that I think we should make it the subject of the next class.  Let’s get the nuts and bolts down first, and Darius, you can lead the discussion next class.”

    Then I run, run to the bookstore and buy the copy my students all had (lesson learned: always get desk copies).  And lo and behold, they have the restored edition; I had had the 1940-something Book-of-the-Month-Club edition that cut all the racy scenes, including the masturbation scene that is, yes, thank god, arguably the crux of the novel’s exploration of race and sexuality.  Same ISBN number, I don’t know why.  So I cram the night before, and teach the masturbation class like I’d always known it.

    But I still have nightmares about that class.  And I still tell my grads about it because I lived the worst teaching nightmare and survived to tell the tale.

    Posted by  on  03/14  at  09:44 PM

  19. It’s not just teaching, Michael. I used to reliably wake up from a nightmare involving the invalidation of my professional degree from Washington University in Saint Louis, which of course rendered my apprenticeship and passage of the excruciating architectural licensing examination invalid. This terrified me, not the least reason for which was that I’d done all my graduate work at the University of Virginia. Yes, I’d almost gone to Wash U., but decided on UVa at the last minute. So, I’d never actually gotten a single course credit toward the rug I was dreamily convinced was being pulled out from under me. But, I was scared, nonetheless. The good news is that, as I aged, these dreams became infrequent, then absent, pushed aside by nightmares filled with screeching monkeys fitted out with rusted steel teeth and wings fashioned from barbed wire, carrying mortgage notes and marriage licenses with my signature on them.

    Posted by  on  03/14  at  10:10 PM

  20. Michael,
    Coincidentally, I dreamt last night that my daughter’s first grade teacher gave me a “F” on an essay I for some reason was assigned to write...I have been out of school for almost twenty years

    Posted by  on  03/14  at  10:58 PM

  21. Half of me wants to say that higher ed teachers don’t even know they’re born - seeing as I am one of those inner city High School teachers who deals mainly with the kind of students who will never see academia, and show total disdain and disinterest at best and threats and violent attacks at worst (amongst other things, I was once even shot at with a BB gun).

    Given all the things I could freak out over, my anxiety dream strangely involves the rather inncouous act of sleeping in, knowing that a class of feral 14 year olds are sitting there waiting for something to happen and plotting and enacting the total destruction of my classroom and each other (if not civilisation as we know it). The dream spirals into a phalanx of angry parents angrily complaining that I put their precious offspring in a position of danger (a bit like that scene in School of Rock)and various ‘disciplinaries’ for me.

    Once, when I did actually sleep in and arrived at school 45 minutes late, not only had nobody on the staff noticed my absence (more likely they did, but left the ramifications to be dealt with by others), but I walked into a particularly worriesome class to find them calmly and enthusiastically out-loud reading a Roald Dahl novel they’d found on a shelf.

    Posted by saltydog  on  03/14  at  11:17 PM

  22. A suburban Pittsburgh school board is going to drop the International Baccalaurate program because it is “too foreign” and promotes “disarmament” and because real americans don’t need no fancy book-larnin’

    I smell a Horowitz in this

    http://kevinswoodshed.blogspot.com/2006/03/real-amuricans-dont-need-no-fancy-book.html

    Posted by rev.paperboy  on  03/15  at  12:43 AM

  23. Fragments of teaching dreams over the years: overslept; call roll but nobody answers because I’m in the wrong class; get up on Tuesday and realize the class started on Monday; can’t find the building; clothes disappear; try to call the office to find out when the class starts but keep dialing the wrong number; can’t find the classroom (really happened); I talk but they ignore me; I"m a student in the class and the teacher casually mentions that he doesn’t speak Spanish because the department needed someone to teach at the last minute and went out on the street and found him (oh, wait, that’s an administrative dream).

    Posted by  on  03/15  at  10:29 AM

  24. I am arriving 30 minutes early to an oft taught large undergraduate lecture class. Will the screen come down all the way? Will the projector’s “black screen” button work? Will the network be up, or must I remember to load the PPT on my flash drive? I go over notes, I pace, I go to the bathroom AGAIN. I attribute this all to teaching in a new building, but it is now spring break here, and I haven’t stopped.

    New blog name? I am NOT Charlotte Simmons!

    Posted by A. G.  on  03/15  at  10:35 AM

  25. I often have the “ghost course” dream.  I guess I’m getting used to it.  I don’t care that I’m in my underwear, or that I haven’t been to any classes.  I sit down to give the exam my best shot, but I can’t read the damn questions.

    Still, I count myself ahead in the dream department.  I had a take-home exam for undergraduate quantum mechanics.  I had given up on one of the questions and gone to bed.  I dreamed the answer to the problem, woke up, wrote it down and went back to sleep.  (For those curious about the dreamed answer, when solving the Schoedinger equation for positronium, use center-of-mass coordinates.)

    Posted by  on  03/15  at  10:40 AM

  26. I never had the Ghost Class dream as a student. I’m surprised to see so many testimonials to it here. But I have often had the instructor version of it. Somehow I’ve failed to meet a huge lecture course for the first nine weeks of the semester, and it’s on a subject I’ve never even considered learning anything about . . . I don’t know anything about it, except that I’m responsible.

    Posted by  on  03/15  at  11:26 AM

  27. Anxiety dreams notwithstanding, Michael, ....one recent dream of mine, a fleeting instance as such, offered instead an opportunity for comfort and solace...thanks to your post on Sadness.

    That night, my unconcious, with definitely a mind of its own, led me to the warm and happy setting of your family’s reunion.  I found myself in the misdt of it all, so real, and oh so uplifting to one’s spirits...the main players pretty well-identifiable; images imprinted, I can only guess, from my few visits to your pix.  Most extraordinary, I’ve never been on such an ‘excursion’ before...must really miss my own, and to add...next morning I find you’ve written about dreams…

    bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I!

    Posted by  on  03/15  at  01:37 PM

  28. I’ve been teaching for four years and every year I pick up an new element for my teaching nightmare:  It used to be just the classic look down and realize I was naked and hope that the students wouldn’t notice.  These nights I’m naked, my notes are blank, I can only think in Spanish and--thanks to a massive (2 by 3 foot,) black swarm of ants I had in my classroom for unknown reasons a few months ago--there are ants.  Sometimes the ants want to report me to the vice-rector.  I wake up in a cold sweat. Thanks, subconscious!

    Posted by Caro  on  03/15  at  02:17 PM

  29. Other grads must have hadthis one- You’ve forgotten to have your advisor fill out your thesis credits form ,and you only find out that you’re not registered for any classes when a student loan letter arrives, telling you to pony up, since you’re not a student anymore.

    Posted by  on  03/15  at  02:48 PM

  30. I had a recurring nightmare about student loan payments.  I use to get it about once a month for about 10 years - first mine, then my wife’s.  It was horribly realistic.

    Posted by  on  03/15  at  04:14 PM

  31. Am I a bad grad student/teaching assistant because I’ve never had one of these dreams?  I guess I really never have time to dream anyway, since I never dream if I sleep under six hours. 

    Is _Rhetorical Occasions_ going to be something along the lines of fellow Columbian John Erskine’s _The Memory of Certain Persons_?  You’re not really a “great books” kind of guy.

    Posted by  on  03/15  at  04:19 PM

  32. Is _Rhetorical Occasions_ going to be something along the lines of fellow Columbian John Erskine’s _The Memory of Certain Persons_?  You’re not really a “great books” kind of guy.

    Actually, Greg, I love me some great books.  But no, Rhetorical Occasions is going to have four linked essays on the aftermath of the Sokal Affair; four essays on nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and cultural studies; ten essays on various facets of academe (anxiety dreams being one of ‘em); six essays on the American left pre- and post-9/11; and ten of my more sustained blog posts.  Just FYI.

    Joanna, I opened my spring 2003 semester by failing to find my classroom, which had been moved by Forces Unknown to Places Unknown.  I finally asked someone in the department of mechanical engineering (where I was lost, of course) if I could use his phone to call the English department and tell me where to go.  I arrived 15 minutes late—and opened by telling my class the anxiety-dream story.

    What about those out of body moments mid-lecture when you can hear your voice, and *everything* you are saying seems like so much gibberish?

    You mean, like, every third class, Fiorentina?  Or, more commonly still: hearing yourself start sentences you have no idea how to finish.  It always amazes me to hear people tell me how quickly I speak . . . I sometimes perceive myself to be fumbling madly from sentence to sentence, and even the slightest gap between words feels like an eternity at such times.

    duhnonymous, that’s a great story.  Reminds me (since Sunday was DeLillo Day) of Jack Gladney taking his remedial German lessons.

    TeacherLady:  Oh.  My.  God.  I’ve taught Native Son before (1990, 1993) and after (2000, 2004) that scene was restored, and I can’t even imagine bluffing as well as you did.  You must be one amazing teacher.  I am in awe.  I would have simply said, “excuse me?  they’re just watching Trader Horn.”

    Brian, I don’t have the steel-toothed monkeys with the marriage and the mortgage documents, but I do have dreams in which I never do find a summer job.  Then I wake up and realize with profound relief that I don’t actually have to look for one anymore.

    And saltydog, even though—or, more likely, because I have this brief fellowship, I had a sleeping-in dream the other night.  Weirdly, though, it was a sleeping-in dream about next semester, and I’d missed the morning class I’m supposed to be teaching next fall.  Thanks, subconscious!

    Posted by Michael  on  03/15  at  04:44 PM

  33. and begin the hike to Zzyzzych 304

    Hell of a nice place, actually. I recommend it.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  03/15  at  06:42 PM

  34. Now in retirement, i still wonder why i felt more anxiety for the classroom than for making presentations, or delivering papers, at symposia and conferences.  Maybe the Ghost class dream is an archetype that must be evidence of one belonging to the teaching profession/guild?  Subconscious archetypal dreaming could be a whole new measure of potential doctoral candidates; dream analysis during oral exams???  Why can we so much more easily stand in front of our colleagues and professional peers, than the never before seen students??

    Posted by  on  03/15  at  06:43 PM

  35. Ghost Class dream, both as student and teacher, check!  Unprepared class dream, recurrently.  In my Zzyzzych-type dreams the classroom often morphs into a common area like a student lounge or coffee shop, and the students gradually stop paying attention to me.

    To pick up on 34, I think that in front of colleagues and peers, we have an audience that understands what we’re doing, in a way, and shares certain values.  For students you DO have to put on a performance, and the bond that holds their attention is much more fragile.  And these days if you don’t keep discipline they *will* wander in and out and chat with their neighbors, as though you were a television program.

    Posted by  on  03/15  at  08:35 PM

  36. Hmmm… beginning to wish I had had the dreams… My tutoring featured me forgetting material fundamental to the course at the end of the semester, arriving last to classes held off-site and giving a mini-lecture where I frothed forth the contents of my honours thesis.  Maybe if I got this stuff done at night I wouldn’t feel the need to act out my fears quite so comprehensively.

    I also have that speech problem Michael - I can’t talk as fast as I think, so I figure I’m speaking quite slowly, and I can’t slow down lest I don’t get the thought out before it escapes into my unconscious’ mind, never to be seen again.

    And thanks for that image of my unconscious having a mind of its own - not only is there an unconscious part of my mind but *its* got a mind too?  No wonder I feel outnumbered so much of the time.

    Posted by  on  03/16  at  01:59 AM

  37. Does it help when you find out one of your fears/recurring dreams has a name, i.e, “ghost class?” I sure hope so.

    Posted by cali  on  03/16  at  04:57 AM

  38. i *wish* i had anxiety dreams. i just have anxiety. i throw up on the first day i teach a class, without fail, every semester. at my home, at least, but i expect that by the time i actually have my phd i’ll probably be doing it in front of my students, as well. or at least dreaming that i am.

    Posted by sarah  on  03/16  at  01:49 PM

  39. As an undergrad I’ve had similar nightmares: the paper I’ve handed in to the English office gets stamped one day later than I handed it in, and my professor doesn’t believe that I Did hand it in on the due date and gives me a reduced mark; I just can’t seem to remember when that stupid Statistics tutorial is until a day too late; the registrars office doesn’t process the drop form and I got an F on that Stats course, but only find out a few years later when applying to another institution. It’s nice to know Profs have similar nightmares! The sad truth is the above blunders did happen to me, which is why I obsessively hand in assignments directly to my professors, even if that means hunting them down in the English lounge, and I check and recheck my schedule for the first month of classes. Despite all of that, I am graduating this spring, and with a decent enough GPA that I’m not worried about getting into the faculty of Education next fall.

    Posted by  on  03/18  at  06:16 PM

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