In my dream I walk into a neatly arranged grocery store and notice that I am the only customer. I wander through the long aisles of merchandise until I reach the section containing cookies and crackers. Out of curiosity, I pick up a large box of cookies and open it. I find that the first layer consists of my favorite chocolate cookies, but the bottom layers consist of types of cookies that I have never tasted. Since I am hard to please, I continue searching for a box containing only chocolate cookies. I look through every box but cannot find what I am looking for. By this time, the entire shelf is a mess.
Later, I walk to the front of the store to pay for my merchandise. I hand money to the clerk, and he pushes a button on the cash register that is supposed to give me my change. When I reach for the change, I am delighted to see that money is flowing out of the machine. I greedily start filling my pockets with money and try not to attract attention. Suddenly, to my surprise, five of my friends come running into the store and jump on the clerk. They throw him to the floor and this gives me time to run out into the parking lot. We barely manage to escape in our cars before the police arrive.
I feel that this dream is related to the rapid learning rate that I have experienced at Tech. In the dream, the grocery store is a representation of my mind as a storehouse of knowledge. Each shelf in the store holds part of my education; for example, the cookie box could be my education in chemistry. My favorite cookies on the top represent the small amount of chemical knowledge that I brought with me to Tech. The bottom layers of cookies represent the vast amounts of knowledge that I have gained this quarter. In the dream, when I go looking in all the other boxes, their layers represent how my knowledge in other areas has grown also.
The neatness of the store represents how I had my thought organized before I came to Tech. During this quarter, I have learned much that conflcts with my old ideas. I need someone or something to help me straighten out my thoughts. This conflict of ideas is represented in the dream by the way I messed up the shelf, and this requires that someone come along and straighten it up again. The presence of the clerk at the checkout counter represents the teacher in a school environment. In a store, the clerk makes certain that every customer pays the correct price. In school, the teacher makes sure that a student earns his grade.
When we manage to escape, this represents the way in which so many students can go all the way through high school wihout ever studying and still make passing grades. The large number of people who go through high school this way is represented in the dream by the five friends who come to my rescue. However, if these people do not study hard in college, they will fail for sure.
This dream is an unconscious reaction to the pressure that I feel as the end of the term approaches. I am very worried about my grades, and I feel that I am not studying hard enough.
— David Bridgers
© Copyright 2002 by Robert J. R. Rockwood. All rights reserved.