As we are now officially in Leaving Certificate week, it is quite a surprise not to have had my usual exam nightmare. The annual dream goes something along the lines of me sitting, sweating like a stuck pig in front of a rickety, graffiti-covered table the size of a serviette.
Deep down inside I know I am going to have to spend the next three hours sitting in front of a Leaving Certificate Applied Physics exam paper, and I also know I have never studied Applied Physics in my life. The smell of the gym hall is all around, and everybody, absolutely everybody, thinks I know what I'm doing. But I don't. I don't at all.
One thing is certain - almost everybody will know exactly what I mean because almost everybody has at some stage had an "Oh-my-God-I'm-sitting-my-Leaving-Certificate-again" nightmare. The details vary somewhat - sitting Leaving Certificate naked/in wrong place/in wrong language/in wrong person's body are my own favourite examples - but the dream is essentially the same.
Indeed, one colleague said recently that her dream has matured with her, and that she has now started dreaming she is her present age sitting an exam. The terrible catch here is that she knows she is too old to be sitting the Leaving Cert., and unless she passes it this time, she'll have to tell her parents she can't graduate. And you've guessed it - it's Applied Physics again.
Although the thought of having Leaving Certificate dreams long after I have checked into Dun Roamin' Home for the Bewildered is a little disheartening, I found this example of the omniscience and longevity of the Leaving Cert. dream rather reassuring. Indeed, the whole reason I bring the bothersome exam-dream issue up is entirely altruistic.
First, the fact that we all have these dreams in some shape or form suggests we're all equally inadequate, or think we are. My mother always points out when I`m going for a job interview or the like that everybody has to go to the toilet - which, while rather icky, often stops complete panic.
The notion that everybody from company directors to rocket scientists probably suffers from the Leaving-Cert. dream, particularly at this time of the year, should probably be a similarly reassuring little statistic to trot out in times of stress.
The other reason for writing about Leaving Certificate dreams this week is of course, that for a large section of the population, it ain't no dream. While reassurances probably won't even register in the grey, desolate wasteland that is the middle of doing your Leaving Cert., I think it is worth pointing out that sitting down voluntarily to put yourself through that hell is, without doubt, the scariest thing you'll ever have to do.
Which is why we all have dreams about it for the rest of our lives. Once you've done it, everything else is chicken feed. College finals? Pah! Childbirth? A doddle. Being Bill Gates and having to pass through the eye of a needle? Easy-peasy. So get it over with and then you're home free, cruising through the rest of your life without a worry in the world.
Except for the odd time that you have the recurring Leaving Cert. exam dream, when you will be plunged back into the cold-sweat terror of the thing. But hey, isn't waking up brilliant? I've never really bought into the whole dream interpretation thing, and when people start trying to tell me what my dream about a snake, a wedding and flying really means, I tend to insist that it was most likely caused by the wedding I had flown to the previous day, wearing a D&G snakeskin dress. Which usually shuts them up. However, there are certain dreams that don't need a dictionary to be explained.
The exam one, for example, is definitely about that crushing feeling of inadequacy which was at its peak when you were sitting down to decide your future (or so you thought), knowing nothing (or so you thought). My other recurring one, which I gather is not uncommon either, is to dream I am desperately in love with someone completely unsuitable, like a teacher, or Bertie Ahern, or a colleague at work.
I am overcome with lust and angst in these dreams, which usually end badly in a tears-before-bedtime kind of way. The terrible thing is that the next time you see this person you can't meet their eye for all the dirty things you were doing last time you "met". Even worse, the feelings of desire sometimes linger on for a worrying hour or two.
I'm not entirely sure what this dream means. When one friend (male) who had a similar dream about a close friend (also male) confessed to it recently, everybody seemed to think it meant something deeply unresolved about his sexuality or about his feelings for his absent friend. "I think it means I shouldn't eat soft cheese just before bedtime," he said firmly - and he might be right. There's something to be said for the idea that having a lot of very vivid dreams shows a deep-seated anxiety about having a lot of very vivid dreams. Certainly in a lot of mine, I am very aware that I'm at it again, having a crazy dream about random people, and this causes me some anxiety. "Why are they in my dream?" I wonder. "What does it say about me?" Whereupon I wake up and realise that, like your typical Irish school essay, it had all been a dream.
In truth, there's little you can do about worrying dreams, short of wrapping yourself in a duvet, sitting in a darkened room and eating cream crackers for the rest of your life. And even then I reckon you'd still have the fear about sitting a notional Leaving Certificate Duvet Manufacture exam. But whatever you do, don't start telling people about your dreams. Because as fascinating as your nightmare of coming back as Emma Noble in a next life might be to you, to everybody else, it's of marginally less interest than Emma Noble in this life. And soon, that recurring dream where you have no friends might just come horribly true.