Dream: Doodling in the margins

School has always seeped into my dreamlife.  In high school I'd wake with a start after my history teacher handed me a stack of empty blue books and informed me that the exam was simply to write down every detail that I'd learned that year.  Naturally, I couln't even recall the spelling of my name.  Interestingly, though I'm now on the opposite end of that equation, my present day school dreams are eerily similar:  a student asks me what we've studied this semester and not only can I not remember so much as a single vocab word, but I'm not entirely sure that I've even shown up to work in the past few months.

I'm hoping that my new part-time schedule will decrease the frequency of these sorts of dreams, but not of my favorite kind of dreaming: the elaborate daydreams that have occupied my schooldays as long as I can remember. While in high school my daydreams filled my classtime and generally took me no further than my weekend plans, my grownup daydreaming is limited mainly to faculty meeting time but takes place on a grander scale.

My dreams are often outlandishly aspirational:  What if we sold the house and moved the family to Bali?   Sometimes they are practical: How can I reorganize the playroom so as not to look as if I'm preparing an audition tape for Hoarders?  A lot of times they are just musings:  Who knew that thinking about getting a pizza with my husband and kids would give me the same little flutter that I felt twenty years ago daydreaming about the boy who was taking me out on Friday night?   What they have in common is that they generally make it no further than some doodles in the margins of my meeting agenda; a plump, sappy heart sits here, a lone palm tree beckons there.

My plan this year is to take these daydreams out of the margins. I will put them in words, I will put them into the world and maybe I'll bring one or two of them into being.  I'm probably a few years from measuring for draperies in my Balinese villa, but I could hit up Ikea one of these days soon for some sensible storage options.