Alive and dreaming

Yes, yes, still alive despite what must be a record amount of time between posts for me. Exams stress is beginning to build. Last Friday night I had a weird dream/nightmare in which I wrote my second exam (on theory--ugh), but instead of being on the theory on my lists, it was about something incidental (and not theory) that my supervisor had mentioned in the dream. So I had no idea what I wrote, but remember dream-thinking that it sucked and that I had failed. All of a sudden another professor (who isn't even on my committee) was there for no apparent reason, and then I was home after being away for a few days only to find that I'd left a batch of blueberry muffins that I'd baked in the pantry when I'd meant to freeze them, and instead I'd have to throw them out because they'd gone bad.

This is normal, though. My friend Dave also had crazy dreams before his exams, including one where his theory exam consisted solely of questions on Terry Gilliam films and math (e.g., Twelve Monkeys and linear algebra).

Karine has a theory that female grad students dream about babies when they have project/dissertation anxiety. I had one of those in January as I was about to start work on a new project with a new supervisor. In that one I'd actually had a baby and I took my newborn to campus with me to some sort of all-day symposium. It (she?) was the best-behaved baby in the world, sleeping through everything. I could practically feel the weight of her in my arms (oddly, I carried it/her like that for the whole dream; why didn't I have one of those baby carriers, or at least a snuggly?). It wasn't until I was walking to school the next morning that I realized that my baby was white.

Thank god I'm not a psychoanalyst.