Stress Dreams

I'm tired of having stress dreams.

More specifically, I'm tired of falling for my stress dreams. I’ll have bad dreams and wake up pissed at myself that I didn’t realize it was a dream.

 

Y'know those stress dreams you get when you’re a student where you have to take a test you haven’t studied for? I still get those. I had one the other night.

 

I suddenly had to take a high school history exam. I'd managed to sneak a copy of the test a couple hours before I had to take it and the essay question on the back was (I couldn’t make this up) to write about famous Queer relationships during Colonial America. As if there were like a few celebrity couples, like Ellen and Portia.

 

So I’m like "Oh shoot, I totally don’t know anything about queer relationships during Colonial America!" Probably because in real life basically none were documented? You idiot? So I open the class textbook to get some last minute studying in and the first chapter is "Queer relationships in Colonial America". This was convenient for the plot of my dream.

 

Now, let’s unpack some of the red flags that should’ve come up for me. First, how about how the first chapter of the textbook was about queer relationships, specifically in this time period. I'm not sure any textbook starts with Queer relationships in Colonial America. Now, if this were a textbook for a gender and sexuality class, maybe I’d buy that. But in my dream this was a good old fashioned Columbus-discovered-America textbook. Best case, there’d be a tiny addendum at the end of every unit.

 

For example, every history textbook I had growing up had a separate little paragraph in each chapter that was just about women during that time period, which allowed you to presume that everything else was about men. It’d be like, "Women during the Renaissance", "Women in Feudal Japan", "Women in Ancient Egypt". It's indicative of a much larger problem. 

 

Another red flag! I’m 23 years old and haven’t been in high school for 5 years and in the dream I still was like, "Yep, gotta write this high school essay. Hope the cafeteria has cookies today. Can't wait for prom. I love this new show Hamilton".

 

Anyways, if you're interested, my next blog post will be my essay about Queer Relationships in Colonial America. It won't be a long one.

Rudolph