Dreams do have meaning, but only one

Half of the modern novels I’ve read have some chapter or scene where the hero has an intricate and convoluted dream which the author describes in great detail. They are usually about the character being in a large grassy field with mists or fog. I guess the reader is supposed to interpret the dream and understand what is going to happen next in the story line or what character traits the heroine has buried under layers of consciousness. I never get it. Even by the end of the book, I never get it.

Should I ever write a novel (not to worry) the dreams will have only one theme, which as near as I can tell from my real-life research and my personal observation is the only theme dreams ever come in. (Those novelists are up in the night.)

As you will notice, this is a timely as well as controversial subject, but as far as I am concerned, all dreams are about one thing—being late for class and not being able to get your locker open. Either you have forgotten the combination or it doesn’t work.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you that your school years are unimportant. You will literally be dreaming about them for the rest of your life.
Okay, there are variations on the theme, but they are all the same thing. You can’t get where you need to be (class or school) with all of your stuff and on time to save yourself.

One variation is the “I can’t remember my schedule” dream in which you keep trying to find clues to help you get where you need to be, but you can’t. You keep slogging around trying different classrooms or halls to see if any of them ring a bell, but they don’t. You can’t even find the principal’s office in order to ask someone what your schedule is. Or if during the odd dream you miraculously find it, they can’t find your schedule either.

Then there is the “I can’t get ready for school” dream in which you can’t find the right clothes or shoes, or you get to school and discover that you forgot the most important article of clothing—your pants (or when I went to school, your skirt).
There is also the “I forgot basketball tryouts” dream in which your friends find you after the fact and ask you why you weren’t at tryouts running multiple ladders like they were.

One more variant of the school dream is the one where you find, when you finally get to your class, that there is a 100-question test for which you are totally unprepared.

I guess fairly recent dream research (not similar to the kind I have done) has shown that people need to get the right kind of sleep so they can dream which in turn makes them well-adjusted and psychologically healthy. Well, either I am not getting the right kind of sleep or not dreaming the right kind of dreams because after one of the locked-locker dreams, I wake up in the middle of an anxiety attack. And that hardly feels healthy.

I have read that anxiety dreams are telling us about current behavior patterns or psychological imbalances that need to be corrected and also that they are present in people who are diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder. What does all of this tell you about high school?

Well, I am not a psychologist, but it’s not that hard. High school is pure raw trauma—an experience from which you will probably never recover no matter how many times you dream about it which explains why you dream about it.
Your only hope is to have a subsequent traumatic experience which will eclipse the high school one and “graduate” your psychological imbalances so that you dream that you can never get to work on time with your trousers on.