Light On Dark Water

I’ve known several people who report having dreams like the one described in this cartoon from xkcd (click for larger version if you can’t read it).

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this before, but it may have been in a comment discussion: this sort of dream seems to be a fairly widespread phenomenon, but I have never had one anything like it, though I know several people who do, regularly.

There are people who are natural students, and people who are not. The natural students basically like school, or at least are very conscientious about it, and care a lot about it. I am a not-student. Of the many hours I have spent in school (first grade through Master’s degree) I probably hated over 90% of them. That was where I received my training in daydreaming, in travelling away in my mind to a more interesting place, which is one of the few things I was ever very good at (not to mention having a natural aptitude for it) but which unfortunately does not facilitate the acquisition of more useful skills. And I never really cared that much about grades, which my record amply shows. In most subjects I could do all right without working very hard, so that was all I did, shrugging off the occasional D in math or something.

So it’s not at all surprising that I’ve never had this dream, while others are regularly tormented by it—my wife, for instance, who was a straight-A student.

I started to call this post “I Was a Teenage Underachiever,” but since I’ve continued to be one for the rest of my life so far it wouldn’t be quite accurate. An underachiever avant le lettre, maybe.

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