Academic Dreams

I try not to try to share dreams, as they generally aren't very interesting to people outside of one's own brain, but this dream had some odd features.  It started out where I was sitting around a seminar table with other grad students.  The teacher was pretty terrible (and I suspect this was the transposition of a bad temporary manager I had a couple of years ago).  At some point, as the class was breaking up, I realized that I didn't need to go to class any more, since I already had been awarded my PhD.  Then there is a transition that is a bit unclear, and then I was being driven down the street with a young, female grad student.

I was probably trying to be helpful (and subtly put the moves on her) when I started offering up some advice on getting key informants in the schools.  At this point, I realized that my research was based on just three interviewees, and I was worried that if anyone found this out, my PhD would be taken away.  So I was trying on one hand to sound like an expert but also prevent her from probing too closely and finding out the secret.

She seemed to have things well underway (perhaps she was studying the school where her daughter went).  So I opened up a bit more, but for some reason I couldn't remember the title of my dissertation.  At that point, we must have parked, since we were walking, and we actually went by the school I had researched.  I debated going in, but she wanted to go through an open air market nearby.  I guess I was getting more desperate to impress her at this point, and I suddenly had the dissertation in my hands (as one does in dreams), I kept flipping through it but couldn't find the title.  Too frustrating!  There was a little bit of the dream left over about losing her in the crowd, but I was definitely starting to wake up by this point.  I suspect the disconnect was that my dissertation was on transportation politics and not urban education, so it would have been quite a stretch to completely make up an entire dissertation on another topic, even in dreamland.

Of course, it would have been far worse had it been the reverse -- if I dreamed I had my PhD, then woke up to find it was just a dream (and I had a long slog still ahead).  I don't recall ever doing that, but it must have happened to some budding academics...