Last night I had that dream again.
                   I dreamed that I had to take a test
                   in a Dairy Queen on another planet.
	           And there was a woman there, 
	           and she was making it all up 
	           and she was writing it all down.
	           And she was laughing. 
	           She was laughing her head off.
	           And I said, "Hey! Give me that pen!"
                                                 Laurie Anderson
                                              Home of the Brave

I don't have recurring dreams, but I often have recurring themes in my dreams. This morning I experienced one such dream. From time to time I have a dream like the one I had this morning. I have never in the past paid enough attention to correlate my then current life situation to the appearance of the theme to try to figure out what sort of events may precipitate it. Perhaps this post will help me to do so in the future.

Occasionally I dream I am back in high school, or, more accurately, one of those dream-logic amalgamations of high school and college. I always enjoy seeing old friends and old haunts, but soon I realize everything is not as nice as I had originally thought. A few times it has been the first day of school and as I arrive on campus I greet old friends, but when the bell rings I realize I either don't have my schedule, or I do, but I can't find the classrooms I'm supposed to be in. This is the pleasant version of the "back in school" theme.

The less pleasant and more frequent variant of the "back in school" theme dream is one in which, as I arrive on campus, I realize the semester is drawing to a close and I haven't done very well (that actually occurred rather too frequently in real life). In fact, I realize that I haven't gone to most of my classes in several weeks. On top of this, it is always my last year. The year after which I should be moving on to a new stage in my life, however it appears that I am doomed to have to repeat it. I remember thinking at one point in my dream this morning, "It's not bad enough that I'm a thirty year old man in high school... Now I'm going to have to repeat a year!" It is interesting to me, though, how the conscious and unconcsious minds interact while dreaming, for soon after having said this to myself, I realized that I wouldn't have to repeat high schoool, in fact I'd already graduated from college. Furthermore I already have a job.

Soon after that my dream metamorphosed into some monkey business about me and Santa Claus (along with his sleigh and the horse pulling it) having to lay on our backs, scrunch down, and slide under the bumper of someone's big white pickup truck to get out of the garage we were in...