Just a Stressful Teaching Dream

I am so ready for bed and it is only 7:57 pm.

This week and the weather have taken a lot out of me.

I even had a substitute teacher dream the other night.

Stressful work dreams have haunted me for years. I had them when I worked as a regular classroom teacher. Usually, those dreams had me standing in front of a room of sullen eighth graders with no lesson plan and no idea of how I was going to fill the hour.  I also vividly remember a nightmare I had while working at Cattlemen’s steak house as a waitress in the late 1990’s. In that dream, my section was so big, I could only get to my tables by driving around in a golf cart. There I was, frantically trying to refill people’s coffee and water and bring them more sourdough bread, all from my little cart. I’ve had a few stressful massage therapy oriented dreams, too. In these, I’m often back at a spa where I used to work, and I’m trying to get my table ready for a client, but the sheets won’t fit, or I can’t find an empty treatment room, and I am running so very late, and there is no way that I will be able to do my assigned massages, and my clients are sitting in their robes glaring at me, and the spa manager is livid.

In the substitute teaching dream I had the other night, I was trying to think of a “Would You Rather” question to ask during the morning attendance time, something which the regular teacher usually does as a way to wake everybody up and get them thinking and talking first thing.  In my dream, the question I formulated was: “Would you rather be with all your friends and not have electricity, or be at home with your electricity and Wi-Fi but not be able to see your friends?”

I never got to the point in my dream of actually asking anyone the question, though.

(My guess?  Electricity and Wi-Fi would win out over seeing friends in person.)

There is probably something in that dream that my spiritual director who is an expert in dream analysis would like to unpack with me.

It seems, though, that I am not sleeping the most soundly or getting the best rest if I am substitute teaching even in my dreams.

On a positive note, though? I saw many of the eighth graders that I’ve substituted for at our high school’s “Future Falcon/Welcome to Spring Semester Night” last week. It was my final one of these, since my son will be graduating in May. But it was the first one for these eighth graders, who are looking forward to high school next year. Every single one of them said hello! They were polite and seemed genuinely happy to see me. It made my night, and gave a sweet note to an evening that was also bittersweet for me, my final “Back to School” night. Over the years, it feels like these evenings will never end, that there will always be another Monday night when you have to rush through dinner and drive back to school to talk to teachers, get syllabi with their names and email addresses, listen to the chamber choir, watch the dance class perform, clap for the student body president who gives a little speech. And then? All of a sudden, it’s the last one, the end of a parenting era. It’s good, of course! We don’t want our kids to stay in high school forever.  But I’m realizing that I’m not quite ready for this season to end.