(I started writing this as a comment on somebody else’s old journal post about a final-exam dream that I stumbled across, and then realized that I could bore more people with it here.)

I have weird, non-nightmare variants of the standard nightmares. In grade school, I had a dream where I forgot to wear anything but underwear to school, and my third-grade teacher called me into her office and started chewing me out for it, and I got incensed at the unfairness of it, since none of the other kids were dressed either, and a few of them weren’t even wearing underwear, so how dare she pick on me? And I yelled right back at her and made her back down.

Then much more recently (and this is a dream I’d had a few times over the years) I had a dream where I realized it was the day of finals in college for a class that I hadn’t even realized I’d been registered for, so I’d never gone to class. But I had the textbook anyway for some reason, and I started skimming through it, and realized, hey, this stuff is easy; I already know all this, and went off to the exam feeling confident.

The dreams about falling are sometimes nightmares, but sometimes I discover halfway down that I can fly, and in one falling dream I knew I was going to die, but in the dream I was thinking, wow, what an amazing way do die! If I have to die, I’m glad it’s this way!

(Note: None of these dreams is recent. I haven’t been getting enough sleep to remember my dreams lately, alas.)