Maybe it’s now the nights have well and truly drawn in, or maybe it’s the long
term and the never-ending list of things to do, but for some reason I’ve been
having a spate of school related dreams. Or nightmares. I don’t know where you
draw the line between the two. They are certainly disturbing, and I’d rather not
have them, but on the other hand I don’t wake up with a “jolt upright and scream
combination” like they seem to do on the TV.
Usually my school dreams are scarily realistic: there I am, standing at the front of a classroom, asking for quiet but not being heard. No-one takes any notice of my requests for quiet. In the dream versions, there’s usually an inspector in the room taking notes on all this too. At least the inspector part doesn’t happen very often in real life.
The other night it was vampires in the school. In my dream, I mean; I don’t know what goes on in the school building at night apart from a bit of ineffectual cleaning. One of the vampires was trying to bite me for my own good, but I wasn’t having any of it. I wasn’t being chased, but the vampire just happened to turn up every time I was preoccupied or dealing with something so important that I couldn’t even visualise it in my dream. It certainly got me thinking on the drive to school: what could it possibly be that threatened to drain me of my very life essence? Well I think the answer is only difficult because there are so many possible replies! Could it be the threat of a surprise lesson observation by one of the managers? The constant drain on my resources of energy? Or the drain of my stash of biros pocketed from conferences?
Once at school there are so many things to think about that topics of car
meditation are mostly forgotten, but it was that night as I crawled into bed,
some time just after Coronation Street, that I figured out the real cause of
that particular nightmare. Next to my bed, under a thin layer of dust, was a
book I’d last had the energy to pick up during the holidays, and yes, it was
a story involving vampires. I just about managed to turn it over so the cover
was face down before dissolving into the pillow once more.
added 27/11/04
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