Legal Commentary

Morning!  I recently had dinner with a friend who is - as I suspect are many of our readers - 8-9 months away from beginning a tenure-track position as a prawf.   She told me that she had her first anxiety dream about teaching a class.  She told me this not to elicit sympathy, but to let me know that she had undergone a particular rite of passage marking her transformation from student to teacher.  I reacted to her news the way I suspect she suspected I would: I laughed, rolled my eyes, and assured her that her dream would be the first in a series of anxiety dreams of this new genre. 

When I went to elementary school here and to high school here , I would dream regularly that I had mistakenly worn pants to school; my dreams involved running from rabbis in hallways and, in high school, riding elevators to avoid them, so that I wouldn't get expelled for violating the dress code.  In college, I enjoyed a series of more conventional anxiety dreams, often appearing unclothed in public places and taking final exams for the wrong courses in buildings on the other side of campus. As a law student, I woke up more than once relieved to remember that class participation only marginally affected my grade; in my dreams, I was always on call and was never prepared.

I don't remember the plot of my very first anxiety dream about teaching. I do know, however, that since December 3, 2005 (the day I got my offer from Hofstra), my dreams have involved teaching a class whose subject matter was entirely unfamiliar to me, defending a paper in a faculty workshop that I had not written, and my favorite (and most recent), receiving an email (sent to multiple recipients) from a colleague attaching a political cartoon through which the colleague expressed the colleague's displeasure with me. 

And those are just a few.  I tend to experience the highest concentration of anxiety dreams right before a new semester begins, as I am drafting a final exam, before a speaking engagement, or before submitting a paper . . . so, I guess, sensibly, I have anxiety dreams when I am anxious.  For those of you who miss reading this column, help others fill the gap that YM Magazine left and use the comments to say anything.  It's just a dream.