Most people are afflicted with anxiety dreams: you're walking down the street and you suddenly realize you forgot to put on your pants. I've had people tell me, decades after they left school, that they have dreams where they have to write an exam unprepared. I've never had one of those. My anxiety dreams are about lecturing.
About once a month, whether or not I'm teaching in a classroom at the time, I have a dream that involves me lecturing. Here's a typical one, written down the morning after I had it. I was at the back of a bus containing my students. This wasn't the course I was teaching at the time; it wasn't clear what course it was, and I didn't recognize any of the students. They were being rowdy, as elementary school kids might on a school bus ride. We were heading for an open-air amphitheatre where I was to give the lecture. But when we got there, it was raining, and it was clear the students weren't about to go out and sit in the seats. There was a huge screen with an overhang, so I could use that, but they were going to have to sit in the bus for the lecture.
I got out to set up, running up the raked steps of the amphitheatre and dashing under the overhang. I squatted down at the edge of the stage and took out my laptop, but it wasn't my Titanium G4; it was one of the new Apple Aluminum PowerBooks (which I had my eye on at the time; I later purchased one). That meant I didn't have my lecture materials on it. I knew it had wireless capability, so I started trying to see if I could find a network to connect to, and maybe get an old version of the lecture materials from my desktop computer. Of course, I had trouble connecting, and the rain was blowing on me; while I was wrestling with that, I kept thinking about the students on the bus starting to drift away, and how I could possibly convince them to listen to the lecture in such miserable conditions. Fortunately, the dream changed at that point.
The settings are quite varied in these dreams, but some essential elements remain the same. I'm not unprepared for the lecture, but what happens is the logistics screw up: I don't have the right slides, I can't find the lecture notes, the equipment doesn't work or isn't there. Usually I have to improvise in some fashion or another. The other thing to note is that the students are never hostile in these dreams, never laughing at me. The anxiety comes from their complete indifference. They aren't listening to me; they're chatting with each other, wandering about. I know that I'm losing them, or I've lost them and have to get them back, but everything I try just seems to make matters worse.
I suppose it's more realistic than forgetting to put my pants on. --PR
(Adapted from a blog posting made September 29, 2003.)