Academic nightmares

I had a frightening dream a few nights ago.

I was outside in the bright sunshine with 10 or so other students. We were wearing sloppy sweatshirts, huddled around a sheep's heart lying in a dissecting pan; a German professor was leading what appeared to be a lab class. He asked for someone from the class to begin the dissection. After about 20 seconds of awkward silence, I grudgingly volunteered. I held the heart tentatively and picked up the razor blade, praying my eighth grade science skills would hold me in good stead. I'd barely made the first incision, however, when the professor began screaming at me that I was doing it all wrong.

"If you had done the reading and made notes you would know what to do!" he thundered. "I am beyond disappointed in you. You will never earn back my respect!" With trembling, still bloody fingers, I pulled out the 2,000-page textbook that had broken my back in the first part of my dream and started frantically flipping, searching for the index. I could feel the eyes of professor and students alike boring into me. By the time I found a labeled diagram of the heart, the professor had disgustedly called on someone else to continue the dissection.

"It's obviously an allegory for your thesis," said a friend to whom I confided this dream and who had heard me complain the night before about my lack of progress in this area. The massive tome represented the reading and research I had yet to do, he suggested; the dissection was the thesis itself. I had subconsciously juxtaposed my lack of preparation and clumsy handling of the knife with the subtle nuances of argument I hoped to eventually achieve. It was, after all, a German professor that I was disappointing.

This was also not my only academic nightmare this semester. A few weeks ago, I dreamt that it was Sunday night, my last free night before Monday and Tuesday evening seminars. Suddenly, time hiccupped, and I found myself in Monday night's seminar. Thank goodness I had already done the reading enabling me to follow along. Just as I was congratulating myself for escaping tragedy, time swiftly shifted again and deposited me into the second half of my Tuesday night seminar. Here I was not so lucky and again received a huge telling-off, all before I could explain that I had mysteriously lost two days of my life and it wasn't my fault that I hadn't had time to school myself in the nuances of German non-narrative cinema.

It helps to know that I'm not alone in suffering these academic anxiety dreams. Friends tell me they've dreamt of walking into the wrong classroom, entering a huge lecture hall 20 minutes late, realizing that something was due after the fact or falling asleep the night before an exam only to wake up the day after it. Professors aren't immune either. When I told my film professor of the starring role he'd played in my scary scenario of the night before, he promised me that faculty members often dream of finding themselves naked in front of a room full of students, unprepared or without materials — on the average, not so different from the nocturnal fears of many students. It's slightly comforting to know that we're all on occasion visited by nighttime embarrassments.

What, then, is the cause of such midnight misadventures? Sigmund Freud would see in anxiety dreams some kind of twisted wish fulfillment; Ebenezer Scrooge would say they result from a "slight disorder of the stomach," from "an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato." Maybe they arise from sample. Or perhaps bookish bad dreams are our unconscious' means of preventing us from making fools of ourselves during the daytime, saving us from real-life academic nightmares.

I think I'll sleep better once finals are over. Emily Stolzenberg '07 is a German major from Morgantown, W. Va. She can be reached at estolzen@princeton.edu.