This Teacher's Nightmares!!!

There ought to be a word for nightmares that aren't nightmares like Tina gets (she's being chased and her screams come across the pillow as moans born of horror and agony which awaken me, quickly, and so I heroically awaken her and am then assured by her still-asleep and breathless "thank you" which makes me wonder if I entered her dream and thoroughly kicked some assailant's ass (which I can't even do in my dreams so I'm grateful for the possibility of doing it in hers) or . . . did I just obliterate the nightmare altogether by awakening her?. No. No drama in mine like that. Mine are just annoying visitations based upon my own insecurity about what I fear is a presumptuousness going on 20 years, i.e., what business do I have in a classroom full of bright, disciplined kids? I get these two dreams, each is annoying and each attempts to put me in my place about once every six months or so:

I'm scheduled to play a piano concerto with the San Francisco Symphony. I know, but it becomes clear to me that no one else seems to know -- or maybe they do! and they certainly should! -- that I don't play anywhere near well enough to play classical music much less classical music with Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra! I don't play classical! I don't sight read very well at all. I have very limited technical fluency or facility on the keyboard so that anything beyond a ballad's tempo or any run up or down the keyboard or any contrapuntal activity requiring a left hand that does anything more than pound chords on the 1 and 3 is wholly beyond me. How did I qualify for this gig? And why do people seem to look forward to my playing? And at what point did I think I could perform with aplomb, fooling everyone? Or did I just go along with whatever ill-founded confidence the music world extended to me? These questions come to me after I awaken, but in the dream they are the inchoate miasma which makes for whatever nightmarish quality the dream imposes upon me.

So . . . here I am, getting ready to go on stage (I guess we have, in fact, rehearsed even!!! and I somehow pulled it off!) in my tux to be greeted by hearty applause, the welcoming smile of MTT, and everyone's happy anticipation of a night of artistry! MTT lifts his baton, the symphony comes in and . . . I play. And sure, I'm a little anxious all the while that I'll be found out, but actually pretty confident, too, and . . . I pull it off! There's applause!

I get the hell off stage . . . .

And there the dream ends.

You might well ask, "Dude, what's wrong with that? That's no nightmare!"

But, of course, it is! Because I know I'm a fake who just succeeded with my fakery . . . and, worse, it will just encourage me to continue with my con and not ever really learn the craft of playing the piano (see "teaching") well. And one day, I will get caught. MTT will step off the podium, look at the music in front of me, look at me, and with both of us scandalized in that moment, he'll point to the f*******ing door.

Who am I to be teaching Shakespeare, Sophocles, Hurston, et al?!!?


And now, for a couple years or so, a new annoyance visits my sleep and in this dream . . . I do get caught:

I'm about to take a final exam in a class for which I have not only not done the work since about the first week of school, I even forgot this class was on my schedule . . . or conveniently forgot . . . up until this moment, the moment when all will become clear as I stare blankly at and leave blank my final exam. And I know that this will mean that I will fail the class; it will mean humiliation.

In this dream, there's no faking it . . . yet anyway. I always wake up, humiliated, before I have to take the final exam. Although I'm not confronted in the dream by any authority, it must be clear to all that I haven't been in class, just about ever, and that I cannot possibly be prepared for this test. I know I don't know and I know that everyone else must know that I don't know . . . anything.

But how is this different from playing with the Symphony? Perhaps one night I will take that final exam and bullshit my way through. I'll hand it in and hang around just long enough to gather my things while noticing the professor leaf through my pages. Yes, in this dream, I can't tell if I'm in high school or in law school (where I was negligent, but not that negligent), and I seem to be a younger man, but with the life experience of the 55 year old that I am. Seems that way anyway.

I wake up mildly disgusted with myself, but then I chuckle because I've escaped the reality, the Truth, represented in the dream and am back in the material world where my smoke and mirrors continue to work wonders.




There must be a name for these dreams. It's not stage fright. As the pianist, and despite my incredulity about being accepted as a classical pianist, in my dream I actually have some confidence that I can do this. Otherwise, I would have run to the nearest exit.

In the final exam dream, I have no intention of "performing" on stage.

I should note that Tina had a somewhat similar recurring dream years ago when she waited tables. She dreamt she had too many tables to wait on. But, you see, in this dream, she didn't create the problem. She's blameless and the injustice of it causes her to scream, a scream of agony that comes across the pillows as moans. So I wake her up. I'm good at that.