I usually keep posts to my dream journal private. This one reoccurs perhaps twice a year for me with some variation and is of the type most people have from time to time.
I’m a student again at Ohio State University and everything is fine except for a difficult math class which I also haven’t been attending at all. The type of ‘math’ is unclear but is extremely difficult along the lines of calculus, or physics. As I type this I’m trying to picture it in my mind but in the dream I’ve only attended the very first class and didn’t understand it anyway. It is also taught by my high school math teacher Mr. Paganelli.
The quarter is coming to a close and having attended only one class I’m now extremely worried that I will fail. Why didn’t I think about attending this class at all during the quarter thinking everything would be fine? I’m in panic mode but I don’t even know where the class is, or how to go about finding my class schedule.
The dream morphs into not knowing where any of my classes are and not knowing how to find the schedule. I have stacks of papers and the schedule must be in one of them but as much as I look I can never find it.
The dream is very distressing and waking up I think about why it keeps coming back. Perhaps it is lodged in my subconscious from my first algebra class my freshman year at OSU. I was always very good at math in high school even placing in the AP course my freshman year. I dropped down to the regular class after that first quarter because I didn’t like how much work we had to do. AP math went faster than the other classes and I could either work hard or coast along. I chose to coast along.
As a freshman at OSU I was amazed to see the algebra class had around 500 students, with a professor who had a very heavy foreign accent and just wrote equations on a projector screen. There was no explanation, just “this is how you do it” in English that was very hard to understand. Well, I didn’t understand the lesson and ended up dropping that class to go into a remedial one to get back on track.
Again, this was shocking for me because I had always been very good at math and I was afraid this might be how all of my classes went. Fortunately, this was not the case and after that remedial class and adjusting to college life I did just fine in every math class afterwards.
Another way of explaining the dream is not from my past but perhaps there is something I need to figure out currently? I really cannot think of anything although I am very worried about what the world is going through. There is the Trump menace here in the USA and a dialing back of progress. There is climate change and we’re starting to see this is very real. We could find ourselves in a very dystopian future not long from now and the Republicans seem hell bent on accelerating climate change than finding solutions. Artificial Intelligence is going to change everything but just like social media, we’re unable to forecast the inherent dangers and don’t pay attention to the few who are able to glimpse the future.
Anyway, I wanted to get the dream down as the feelings of fear and anxiety from the dream quickly dissipate.
