I don’t usually remember dreams, but I always remember nightmares.

My recurring nightmare since college finds me waking in my dorm room in a panic, realizing that I haven’t attended one of my classes all semester and that today is the final. My angst, though, is not that I haven’t studied for the test. In my version of sheer terror, I’m worried that I won’t find the classroom (haven’t been all semester, after all) and that I won’t do well enough on the final to offset a whole semester of homework and tests. The explaining as I walk in, really, dwarfs my realization that I don’t even have a passing familiarity with the name of the class, let alone the subject matter.

For the first time, that dream has changed.

Last night I dreamt I was a spy. Kickass, counter-terrorist, highly trained Superspy. And I was assigned a mission to go save a bunch of innocents by stopping evildoers. I probably even had the skin-tight yet highly flexible costume of all highly skilled and intelligent women, as mandated by mainstream (read: feminist) television and movies.

But I realize as the appointed hour arrives and I leave the weird government building (which seems a lot more ASPCA than Langley, VA) that I don’t know where to go to stop the bad guys. And that I have no bullets. None. Big ol’ gun that I’m sure I know how to dissemble and reassemble blindfolded in under 20 seconds, but no ammunition. And somehow I’m supposed to get in my rental hatchback (wtf? how am I supposed to spy with this tin can?) and drive to…somewhere…and stop a major plot with an empty gun.

I awoke as I was trying to figure out if, somehow on my way I could stop and break into a sporting good store (my assassination/rescue mission began in the wee hours, naturally) for bullets.

Stress I get. Fear of academic failure…sure. Concern that I’ll be at the wrong place at the wrong time…clearly a theme for me. But worried that I can’t save the world because I’m ill equipped? Come on subconscious. Now you’re just scaring me.