Tag: dreams

Whoops

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I swear to you that I woke up in a cold sweat at 3:17 in the morning last night, unable to remember whether I had written a blog post or not, and had to check my phone and confirm that yes, I had managed to deliberately skip a Saturday update and then accidentally miss a Sunday, and then fell back asleep and managed to have a nightmare about missing the meeting that I had to go to for work this morning. I did not miss the meeting, although I did manage to oversleep a little bit and then dragassed my way to work, making myself one of the last people to actually arrive for the thing.

Which … whatever, no one cares so long as you show up within the first 10 minutes or so.

Today was kind of a momentous anniversary; while it’s not literally a calendar year according to the date, I started at my new job on the Monday before Thanksgiving week last year, and this is the Monday before Thanksgiving week. I continue to believe that taking this job ranks among the smarter decisions I’ve made in my lifetime, and in all honesty the last year or so has finally been clearly trending upward after a whole lot of years in a row that I had described as the worst year of my life.

This is gonna be a weird week; we have NWEA testing tomorrow and Thursday mornings, and Wednesday morning there is a big choir practice that will take a fairly large number of my kids away for the morning. The combination of both in the same week, especially knowing that next week is only two days, has made planning … tricky. We’re starting slope this week, a topic so complicated and fraught that talking about it in public caused a man to threaten my Canadian teaching license several years ago. Hopefully it goes better for me this time; I miss teaching in Canada.

In which this is never going to stop

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Had a full-blown Teacher Anxiety Dream last night, where I was in my first Chicago classroom in my first post-certification job, and I decided midway through class that I needed to quit. Only somehow I was also still working in my current district, only at a different school, and I was very concerned that everyone understood that I was quitting only the Chicago job and not the Indiana job, because the Indiana job was better.

And then, because I was quitting, I had to talk to the assistant principal about it, only it was my current assistant principal, which in the weird awareness of dreams I knew wasn’t quite right but couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t right. And she brought me downstairs, carrying the few possessions I’d decided I was taking with me, and then I realized that the building had been extensively renovated on the bottom floor, somehow looking like yet another middle school, one I’ve never actually worked in, but hugely ornate and gorgeous inside the rooms.

I’m pretty sure I actually woke up and fell asleep at least once during the dream, too, and went right back into it.

Stupid brain.

Last night’s anxiety dream

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Sunday night’s dream was that I was late to a concert and then when I got there I was the only person in a mask, plus a nice little dab of high school anxiety. Last night, I had a dream where I was the only other person nearby while a cop was being brutal and abusive toward a Black woman at a traffic stop, only I couldn’t figure out how to get my phone to record a video and by the time I managed to parse the UI he already had her in his car and had driven off.

The really ridiculous part is that the dream also included the post-arrest Twitter rant I went on, which was about, not policing, not a description of the arrest … but about how app designer’s obsession with subtle UI elements has led to a world where something simple like “I want to record this thing happening in front of me” requires me to carefully look at every part of the screen in case there’s a tiny, 50% transparency circle in the top right corner that I’m supposed to naturally realize means “record.”

Which, uh, isn’t how my phone works at all— the “record” button is literally giant, centered, and red– but hey, dream.

More later. If nothing else, I know Mark Oshiro put up another video from Remember that I need to watch and post.

It is too early in the morning for this shit

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

It is 9:09 in the morning, I have been up for approximately 39 minutes, and I have not had my coffee yet. I had a dream last night where I won tickets to a Phil Collins concert, was late to the concert, showing up only after the entire first set had finished, and then realized that not only was I the only person at the entire show wearing a mask but that somebody from high school who I never want to see again was sitting right in front of me.

Since waking up, I have checked my email, to find a message from the guy who is supposed to be my new partner teacher this year. He has sent me a couple of emails over the last week or two. I did not respond to the first one, and just replied to the second last night saying that I had basically been ignoring my work email (true) and that I would be in the building sometime this week to move my stuff between classrooms and that if he wanted to get together I’d let him know when I would be in.

I received a response this morning. He will not be in this week, because he is driving with his daughter to South Carolina to attend a wedding. South Carolina is currently in worse shape than Indiana is, and I suspect anyone dumb enough to be holding a wedding right now is also dumb enough that there will be no masking and/or social distancing involved.

This motherfucker doesn’t get to come near me for two weeks after he gets home. Sorry! Except not.

I’m done for the day now, I think.

In which that’s a bit on point

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I had a dream last night.

My dad and I were driving me to college, and for some reason we’d rented an SUV– specifically, a royal blue Ford Escape– in order to get me there. I was driving, and for some reason I was having an immense amount of trouble keeping control of the car– any touch of the accelerator was pushing us back into the seats, tapping the brakes was tossing us into our seatbelts, and I kept trying to make minor corrections to how we were driving and ending up in the wrong lane or nearly off the highway.

At some point, one of those accidental lane changes ended up with us on an offramp and on a new, unknown highway, now definitively going in the wrong direction.

So: I was going back to school, not at all in control of the vehicle I was driving, and going the wrong direction.

My brain does not deal in subtleties.

In which I’m not here right now

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, TeachingLeave a comment
This song has nothing to do with the post.

I slept last night, at least in the technical sense, and I vaguely remember even being pretty comfortable, so it wasn’t a tossy-turny sort of night, but hell if I didn’t spend the entire night having constant, vivid anxiety dreams of the sort of “I’m late for work/unprepared for class/can’t find my clothes/everything is going wrong” sort of genre, along with a handful of actual nightmares that I don’t remember as specifically. I still owe you guys a post about the training last week and I want to review a game called Salt and Sanctuary that ate a large chunk of my free time last week (and is about to eat an hour of tonight) but I’m going to bed early tonight and I’m going to hope I’m more of a human being at work tomorrow than I was today.

That said, briefly: I’ve had a couple of days recently where I know good and goddamned well that I’d have come home from work and immediately spent the entire evening stressing out and looking at want ads, and since I’ve been on the Effexor … well, the job and the kids aren’t better, but my reactions to them have been a hell of a lot healthier. Like, I can have a bad day at work now and come home and just lay the shit aside and have a nice night with my family. This shit is a miracle drug, which is not something I’d ever have said about Lexapro. I could be writing more fiction, but … well, that’s never not true, so meh.

I’ll try and be more productive tomorrow.

Hooray for metaphors!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Stories2 Comments

(Writing this at work, on my phone, so expect typos and formatting nonsense.)

I had a dream last night. I was at the Student Union at Indiana University, where I went to college, and I came out over this large staircase they have in the back of the building.

The stairs led down to desert, which is not there in the actual building. I got halfway down the stairs and realized that ahead of me there were snakes– sidewinders, specifically– as far as the eye could see. Thousands of them.

I turned around, and the path behind me back to safety was full of angry hornets. Where I was was moderately safe but I still had to kick a snake away or swat a stinging insect every few seconds.

I stayed there, growing gradually more terrified, until I woke up.

Shut up, brain.

Feel free to psychoanalyze me

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized3 Comments

2016_1.pngThe Olympics start tonight, if you’re into that.  I personally am not.  For my part, I’ll count them a success if none of the athletes die and the Games themselves don’t lead to a global pandemic.  My years as an educator have predisposed me to high standards, you see.

I’ve been having weird dreams lately, guys.  I generally don’t remember my dreams at all– more than one in a month that I remember past my morning shower is unusual.  So the fact that I can still remember dreams from three of the past five days and am pretty certain I can reconstruct the other two given some time is Goddamned weird, and possibly a sign that I’ve been a bit too sleep-deprived lately.  And, again, in addition to the fact that I’ve remembered them, they’ve been weird dreams, mostly dreams about people I have little contact with outside of occasional Facebook likes and haven’t seen in years.  One of them was about trying to get a woman to take me back after a mutual breakup; in the real world we not only never dated but I was never even into her like that.  She’s married with a couple of kids now and we haven’t spoken face-to-face in damn near a decade and a half.  Another was about going to New Orleans with three of my oldest friends– or, to be a bit more precise, two of my oldest friends and one of their husbands– only to realize partway through that the husband was with the wrong woman and that everyone had been really uncomfortable the entire time and I just hadn’t noticed.

Also, I swear to you that I’ve had dreams set in this weird proto-New-Orleans before.  I’ve never been to Louisiana, much less New Orleans specifically, so it’s really odd that my brain has this chunk of NO mapped out well enough to revisit it in more than one dream.

Oh, and I woke up seriously mad at the husband, and had to fight off the urge to text one of them to tell them about it.

Three hours until my eye doctor appointment.  I have high hopes that fiction might actually be accomplished.  Or at least lunch.  Cleaning.  Something.  I also got Searching for Malumba available at Smashwords.  It is, naturally, griping at me about Various Issues, so it’ll pop up at the other non-Amazon services as soon as I get around to fixing whatever it’s mad about.  But it’s up at Smashwords!

More later, if anything interesting strikes me.