Fear

It is Friday the 13th, my favorite day of the year after my birthday, because – at the risk of sounding like the tragic heroine of an early 2010s young adult film – I think it is lucky. It’s never consistently in the same month and sometimes it happens twice a year and sometimes it doesn’t happen at all. It’s also during Virgo season this year, my second favorite season (after Taurus.)

I have been worried about my luck recently, and about my place in life as it is right now at twenty eight. My brain finished developing sometime in the last year, and since then it’s felt like I woke up from a hypnosis and now have to make sense of everything that’s happened for the last two and a half decades. I worry about making the wrong choices and not getting what I want from my adult life. I am very, very afraid of not getting what I want, because that feels like something I was deprived of a lot as a child and young person, and I have a belief (that I’m working on) that if I don’t get what I want then I will have failed a karmic test, that I’ll repeat all of my parents’ mistakes and then I’ll die and be reincarnated into a more difficult and hard headed person who will most likely make even worse decisions than I have.

I am desperately afraid of making choices that move me backwards. I have recurring dreams where I have to go back to school to finish a course that I never took. It’s often Calculus, which I almost failed my senior year because I never did my homework and often did skip that class because I didn’t have a crush on anyone in it. In these dreams, I am always an adult, at my current age.

In my favorite of these recurring dreams, I dreamt that I had to go back to preschool, at my current age of twenty-eight years old, because, in the reality of this dream, my mom lied on my kindergarten application and said that I completed pre-school when I actually didn’t. In the real world, just so everyone knows, I absolutely did go to preschool. I remember it vividly, I cried so hard I peed my pants on my first day because I am pretty sure I was not yet “potty trained.” Yes, it is crazy of my parents to sic an untrained toddler on a preschool teacher and I do not condone their behavior on that day or, frankly, any day that followed in the twenty-four years that have passed.

So, I go back to preschool and am fully an adult in a classroom of children. I do not understand why I am there and neither does the teacher. I want to ask if she wants help teaching but I feel that is disrespectful to suggest, as I am her student. Because I can read and write and have a college degree, I am bored, and my classmates keep asking me why I am so big and so old. We are tasked with some sort of activity that involves blocks, which should be fun, but I am miserable and questioning my entire life and existence. And then, I am struck by the realization and understanding that I have a college degree, one that I received six years ago. So why am I in preschool? I have fully already graduated college which implies that I have graduated all of the schooling before that. I question this out loud to my teacher until she physically disintegrates in front of me and I wake up. 

That logic is also what gets me out of the recurring high school dreams, which, while still very silly, are more dreadful because I was miserable in high school, still undiagnosed with an anxiety disorder. I also had braces and was missing my canine teeth until I was sixteen. In the high school version of these dreams, I’m back in a math classroom of my Chicago suburb alma mater, and am feeling totally defeated until I remember that I already went to college, in New York, where I dreamt (as in fantasized, aspired, etc.) of living for most of my childhood, and I wake up. 

I’ve never been transported back to middle school, perhaps because it was too much of a true horror for my subconscious to unearth from my memory.

Having dreams about having to go back to school is a common anxiety dream. So common that, if you’re curious, there’s this Atlantic piece by Kelly Conaboy about this very genre of dream.

Diedre Barrett, a dream researcher at Harvard, explained via this article that these dreams “tend to pop up when the dreamer is anxious in waking life,  particularly about being evaluated by an authority figure…who could most easily crush them. In each of these dream scenarios, we revisit the space where we first experienced success or failure based on our performance.”

Each time I find myself in these dreams before I make the logical conclusions that allow me to awaken, I’m like, “Oh my God, I’ve done everything I’ve done and lived through everything I’ve lived through just for me to end up here, where I started.” To me, in these dreams, being forced to return to primary school means that I have failed as an adult in some way. 

More than moving backwards, I’m afraid of not making progress. I anxiously collect crystals whose sole purpose is enacting positive change. I follow the moon cycle and deep clean my entire space each full moon to purge anything that is holding me back. I find myself resistant to being truly close to the people I love in case they are removed from my life. In my dreams, I’ve ended up back in a place I was desperate to leave, which means I have failed myself, the person I am most afraid of failing.

Conaboy relays advice from a dream analyst to work with these dreams, who says, “immediately post-dream, while you’re lying in bed, imagine the dream scenario again, but this time with a more calming outcome. The example she gives is a teacher telling you that you’ve already passed the class. ‘You don’t need to do this,’ they might say. ‘You’re okay.’”