My Recurring Anxiety Dream

I’m back at college which is weird because I’m much older than everyone—I’m my present age—but it’s sort of okay because I know my way around.

On the bright side, I can reconnect with my old friends whom I’m excited to see. (There is never any explanation for why they will also be there or if they will also be there. They just will!)

It’s nearing 5pm, the time we’d usually go to dinner which by the way seems so early, but I don’t know how to reach these friends. Will I go to Frank Dining Hall (always Frank on South campus, never Frary on North campus) by myself?

It wouldn’t be the worst to go by myself but I don’t really know anyone except my old friends given the circumstances (the circumstances being I’m old and suddenly back in college), and I really wanted to go with my old friends. That’s kind of the perk of being back in college after so many years.

I struggle get them on the phone. I have to find their five digit extension. In one dream I called the scholarship committee and yelled at them because they wouldn’t give me Elisa’s extension which isn’t exactly how anything works.

And then somehow I always find out that one of them is avoiding me. They know I’m back. Oh THEY KNOW. And instead of being excited to see me they are somewhere between lukewarm and outright angry. Not all of them but one or two of them.

Of course this is painful and I just want to know WHY.

(This exact dynamic also happens in dreams where I’m suddenly back in Orange County which is where I both grew up and lived after college, and at the very least I can see my old OC friends in this dream but they are hard to reach and one of them is avoiding me. Yami if you’re reading this, what the hell. But this is about college and not post-college!)

Also there is usually some kind of drama, a lot of drama really, with what dorm room I will be put in. Often I’m placed in an already occupied room on South campus which is where the first and second years are placed vs North campus which is where juniors and seniors typically live.

In real life there were often a few upperclassman who were placed on South campus—transfers, say, or people majoring in biochemistry—and I envied their equanimity. Their faith that the social life that was meant to find them would. I needed to be plopped into the thick of it so it had no choice but to include me.

There’s also the dream where I just haven’t been going to class, like I just forgot, and now it’s nearing the end of the semester and I want to keep not going but I also feel like I’m going to have to face the music at some point, but that’s such a garden variety school nightmare versus the above which is sophisticated and refined.

Speaking of recurring dreams, of which I have a lot, I had a recurring Adam Carolla Show dream last night.

I was in New York and the Adam Carolla Show was also doing some live shows in New York. Somehow it’s decided that I will be a guest on one of the shows.