This fall’s catalogue from Treasure Valley Community College contains an extension class titled Introduction to Conscious Dreaming. The course costs $89 and promises you will “acquire the skills for working with dreams to increase and deepen self-understanding…and effectiveness in life’s journey.”
Why didn’t I think of that. I graduated high school with a 4.0 in daydreaming. At $89 a pop, I could teach anyone to do it even those go-getters who filled up the front seats of the classroom and instantly stabbed the air with their hands whenever the teacher looked like asking a question.
Daydreaming is not as easy as it looks. You should never gaze out the window, never put your head down on your desk and, of course, you can’t go to sleep. If you do, you are no longer daydreaming, you are real dreaming and certain to get caught.
Some teachers are easier to daydream on than others. In high school we had a history teacher named Lawrence Duclos whom everyone called Sominex (“Take Sominex tonight and sleep, sleep, sleep…”) because of his soft voice and droning delivery. He hardly ever randomly asked questions to ensure you were paying attention. The difficulty in his class was staying awake.
I perfected a method of sitting upright with my arms flat on the desk and fixing my eyes on his bow tie while my mind traveled the world. Mark Constance tried placing his elbow on his desk and resting his chin in the palm of his hand, a good enough method with less droning lecturers, but fatal in Sominex’s class. Before long his head slid from his upright palm into the elbow of his other arm and he was gone. Mr. Duclos told Dennis Adams and another keener actually taking notes to carry his desk into the hall where he could sleep in peace.
Lois Stout, the math teacher, was another matter. She often started the class with worksheets then walked up and down the ails between the desks with her ham-hock arms crossed across her more than amble chest and stomach checking your work. This also made it nearly impossible to cheat on tests, although I did develop a quick glance method of jumping from Miss Stout to Glen Reeves’s paper that helped me pass geometry.
The only way to get some daydreaming time was to ask Miss Stout a question about a problem before she got to the worksheets. She would turn to the blackboard and work out the entire problem, ham-hocks swinging as she wrote, while we stared out the window into a land far, far away. The keeners sometimes helped by asking more questions.
I pretty much quit daydreaming in college where you don’t have a class every hour of every day. If they had offered any courses in the subject, I certainly would of taken them. I don’t know where the guy teaching the course at Treasure Valley Community College got the masters degree listed after his name, but then a lot has changed in the last 40 years. Imagine, a masters degree in daydreaming. They probably offer a PhD, too. I could be teaching at Stanford.
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