Real Life Nightmares

For almost my entire adult life, when there has been a lot of stress at work, and when I'm worried that I might not be getting something done that I need to get done, my subconscious responds with variations of the same nightmare. While the details of the nightmare sometimes change, the plot basically breaks down this way: I'm a teacher, and it's the first day of school, and no matter how hard I try, I can't seem to find my way to my classroom. The school I'm in is vaguely familiar, but it's not Lloyd High School, the school I taught in for fourteen years. No matter how hard I try, I always end up back in the same spot in the school building, and each time I arrive back at the spot I'm more panicked than I was the time before.


When I was a teacher, I'd usually start having this nightmare about two weeks before school would start, and I'd have it every night. It was usually a sign that I needed to get into the school building and start getting ready for the new year. Time to prepare bulletin boards and modify class syllabi and start planning out in detail the first few weeks of the year. I'd spend one or two eight-hour days at school, and the nightmares would stop.

Sometimes, as I mentioned before, the dreams would vary a little (my subconscious trying to keep me on my toes, I guess). Sometimes I'd have no problem finding the classroom itself, but once I got there I had no idea what it was I was teaching, and no idea who the students were. The students were coming in five minutes and I was completely unprepared! Or sometimes I'd know what I was teaching, but I couldn't get the students to do ANYTHING. I'd tell a student who was out of his seat to sit down, and while I was addressing him four or five other students would get up and walk around, and others would start talking, and things were just completely out of control.

These nightmares were so regular that I didn't even have to explain them to my wife. I could just say, "I had another of those beginning of the year nightmares. I must be stressed," and she'd know exactly what I meant.

Seven years ago I left the classroom and took my current job as Chief Information Officer. The nightmares, however, didn't stop. In fact, they were more frequent. I STILL have stresses in my current job, maybe even more of them, and they come throughout the year rather than just in August. So the nightmares kept coming. Interestingly, though, they never changed into CIO nightmares. They remained nightmares about teaching LONG after I quit actually teaching.

Until just recently. These last two weeks, over my school district's Winter Break, I did something that I don't think I've done ever in the seven years that I've had the job: I completely disconnected. I went whole days without even checking my work email. Sometimes I didn't even carry my smart phone for an entire day (I know--shocking). I DID go into work one morning, just to turn on computers that had been off over the break so that they could pull down updates, but mostly I left work behind for more than a week. Apparently it was too much of an abrupt change to my system--I started having panic nightmares again.

But they weren't teaching nightmares this time. Instead, one night I dreamed that my daughter's high school marching band was getting ready for a band competition, and I was the drum major.

"I'm not in the band!" I remember telling the band director, who was helping me get my uniform on.

He didn't make eye contact with me, just smiled as he stared at the jacket he was helping me get on. "Doesn't matter," he said. "The band members voted, and you're the leader of this band."

"For Pete's sake!" I shouted. "I'm 42 years old! I'm not even in high school. The band will be disqualified!"

"I don't care," he said. "You're the man!"

"But...but...I've never done this before! I don't know HOW to keep time. I don't have any rhythm! Have you ever seen me dance? Or said better, TRY to dance?  I don't know ANYTHING about the program! I don't even know what songs we'll be playing!"

"None of that matters!" he shouted at me, finally making eye contact. "We're on!" He started pushing me towards the football field.

And then I woke up.

Last night I dreamed that my family was on vacation, and no matter what I did, I couldn't find our hotel room. I had a room keycard in my hand, with the room number written on the envelope the card was in, but I just couldn't get there. The elevators would be broken, and I couldn't find the stairs, and when I finally made it to the room I'd look down and the room number on the keycard envelope would be different. The room was on an entirely different floor!

It was frustrating.

So I guess my days of having nightmares about teaching are over. Or at least, they've been joined by these other dreams. But I've STILL never had a nightmare about being a CIO.

I spent time as I was getting ready for work this morning trying to figure out why that is the case, and an idea occurred to me: I don't NEED to have those types of nightmares about my job because I have REAL LIFE NIGHTMARES often. I don't need to dream about them because they ACTUALLY happen in this job. There are days when I really do come to work and walk in the door only to be told by the secretary that it's ten minutes until school starts and the Internet is down all over the district. That's REALLY happened to me, and on more than one occasion. And it's not the only nightmare:

•  Less than a week after I started this job I got a call at home on my cell phone that the construction company building the kitchens at Miles Elementary had cut through the main electrical cable for the building, and that it had set something on fire in the network closet. I rushed to the building and found that the "something" was the battery backup/surge suppressor for the network closet. It had been hit by such a large surge of electricity that it had been completely fried and had allowed electricity to pass through it. EVERY piece of equipment in the network closet was fried, including the main switch and the building router. I got a crash course in network configuration that week. At least it happened in the middle of July when there were few people in the school.
• I was at lunch once with my wife when I got a phone call that the hot water heater in the Board of Education building had ruptured, water was spewing everywhere, and the main district network closet had an inch of water in it and that water was rising fast (I let my wife get the check).
• Earlier this year I had a file with a list of information that I had to send off to an assessment company so that they could set up an online test for us. Each time I sent it off with corrections they would send it back, sometimes with NEW corrections that hadn't been there before. I'd sent this list of information off a dozen times before, and I'd NEVER had this many problems.  As the date for when testing was supposed to begin kept getting closer and closer, I finally said to the company, "Look, if you find any errors this time, just delete the entire lines of information and just use the good stuff." Their answer: "We can't do that. That's not how we do things." I finally asked the woman on the line, "Look! Am I being punked? 'Cause if I am, this isn't funny!"

So maybe all of those stress nightmare have been preparing me for the real nightmares I sometimes face in this job.

In any event, I came back to work this morning and the district's network was functioning fine, and the world hadn't ended, and I got a lot of work done, so maybe I'll have a night of sleep tonight that doesn't include me leading bands or wandering hotel hallways.