My own worst personal nightmare

My old, familiar nightmare came back again this weekend. I've been having it regularly for the last four or five years. The dream is always a little hazy and hard to pull myself out of, but intensely realistic. It goes like this: I get notice from good old Woodrow Wilson High that due to some glitch in their filing system, they've only just now realized that I never really earned my high school diploma. I'm always short at least a couple of classes -- usually some combination of chemistry, math, German, or biology. In order to correct the problem, I have to immediately return to Portland, move back in with my parents, and start going to high school classes again.

From there, the dream breaks off into several possible variations. Sometimes the kids that I went to high school with are still there, but none of them have changed. I'm the only one who is 26 (though usually I don't look it on the outside) and I'm forced to go to class, edit the high school newspaper, go to cheerleading practice, and do all that stuff we used to do, but I'm 26-year-old me on the inside. I have to do all these things while finding it stupid and embarrassing, while worrying about how long Avalon will let me be away from work and whether or not I should find someone to sublet my apartment to.

Sometimes I go back to high school and it's all new kids that I don't know. These kids are the appropriate age for high school in 2005. I'm a freaky outcast because I'm an adult who is stuck in Geometry class sitting behind them. Often in these dreams, I go to the classes over and over, but I just can't seem to pass any of them. Or I'll finish one class only to go to the counselor's office and find out that there are three more I have to take. I try to negotiate deals with the school. I try to reason with the administrators that obviously I should be worthy of a high school diploma if I earned a BA, but it never works. I'm stuck in the dream with an overwhelming sense of panic and imprisonment. I can't get back to my life in San Francisco for years, all because I never graduated from high school.

I know they sound funny, but the dreams are actually terrifying. I wake up in a cold sweat, all the blankets on the floor, and thirsty. Once I'm awake I'm overwhelmingly relieved to find that I'm an adult, I'm in my own home, and that I could easily pass chemistry, math, German, or biology if I had to (okay, maybe not German). Still, the dreams always leave me freaked out and deeply disturbed. The exact feeling is hard to pinpoint, but it has to do with the lack of control. Could I lose the ability to make my own choices? To pick my own life? To make up who I want to be? What if I was forced to be fifteen in Portland again? For me, fifteen in Portland was powerless.

This time, the dream had a new twist. For the majority of the dream, I was trying to negotiate a way to earn my high school diploma in time to get back to Berkeley to start their MBA program in the Fall.