People often have dreams about missing tests, learning that they had been missing class in a course that they didn't even know they were taking, and so forth. I don't remember my dreams often, but when I do, they are often doozies, and I once had a dream that certainly must be in the top-tier of these anxious school dreams.
It started fairly standardly; it was final exam day and I discovered, somehow, that I had been registered for a course, Chemistry, that I didn't even know I should have been attending, but I had to take the final exam anyway. So I went to the classroom for the examination and got the test booklet, and when I sat down and opened it, my heart sank to the floor.
The test was a holographic pop-up book. I opened the book, and all these holographic things literally started to pop out of the book in the way things pop out of a pop-up book. What is more, the test was some kind of weird boardgame that involved answering questions to move spaces and get through various boardgame-like holographic obstacles and problems. And when you got to the end of it on one page, you went to the next page and there was a new, completely different holographic pop-up boardgame.
Well, I struggled through this incomprehensible exam in a course I had never attended, and did manage to get to the end of the test. But I knew I had failed. And then when I closed test booklet, my heart sank to the floor again.
I had gone to the wrong examination room and taken the wrong test. I was supposed to be taking a chemistry test, but the test booklet very clearly and obviously said in great big letters, COSMOLOGY.
Whenever I hear the word 'cosmology', I think of that dream. Being a teacher, I have also often wished that I could do a final exam that was a holographic pop-up book boardgame.
I've had other crazy dreams, like the time I chased Immanuel Kant with a broom, or the time I uncovered a secret espionage plot, or the time I won a public debate about astronomy by singing "Down in the Valley", or the time I was teaching class, discovered suddenly to my horror that I was completely naked, then sighed and kept teaching. But that's probably one of my flashiest dreams. The visual effects of that exam were amazing.
