you know that dream about sleeping through one's alarm clock and then showing up for school having read the wrong assignment? and subsequently experiencing that gut-wrenching, heart-pounding fear-of-being-called-on?

even when i just think about it, i can almost feel the acid churn in my stomach now. although, i suppose that could be the taco i ate for lunch.

psychoanalysts attribute this type of dream to a manifestation of latent content. here, that dream is most likely a vehicle to represent anxiety. or a symbol of castration as a punishment for masturbating. but probably just anxiety.

a week deep into law school and it's already happened to me twice -- not the dream; actually oversleeping and reading the wrong assignment. and the anxiety in real life is no less intense than in freud's world of analysis.

for me, adapting to law school has been a little like asking a fish to grow wings. presumably i'll learn how to fly eventually, but after spending a year navigating the waters of finance and accounting, i find myself asking for "the bottom line" and desperately seeking real world applications for very hypothetical notions. and begging the administration to bring in an operations management professor to help them figure out the unbearably inefficient lunch lines.

although i almost popped a boner in torts when a case demanded a knowledge of discount rates and the time-value-of money, the horrible scarring of business school became most apparent this week in my civil procedure class. in a case used to demonstrate due process and the weighing of individual rights against the financial burden on our government, my die-hard non-profit-do-gooder-uber-liberal role in the business school classroom -- for just a moment -- flickered into the greedy, fiscal conservative i fought so hard to trip in the hallways of business school last year.

of course, i sensibly came back to my people, but in recounting my fleeting conservative moment horror story, my i-banker friends were tickled. i'm not sure if they were more pleased with my own transformational business school experience or with themselves ... most likely the latter.

when i was younger, my friends used to make fun of me for my simple coping mechanism to deal with overwhelming excitement, anxiety, or stress: i fell asleep.

you name it: i slept through get-togethers, birthday parties, and occasional court-side basketball miami heat games. it might seem like an odd reaction to a physical adrenaline rush -- a hormone that, when secreted into the bloodstream, rapidly prepares the body for action in emergency situations. but leave it to me to fuck up thousands of years of biological human behavior.

needless to say, between starting law school, maintaining my business school network, and continuing my part-time intern work for kuugle, this week has been a whirlwind of anxiety. fortunately, i have yet to sleep through class or fall asleep while driving, but i have unfailingly fallen asleep during every reading assignment -- which is probably why i'm doing the wrong ones.

... at least i don't have to fear bad dreams of sleeping through my alarm clock or showing up for class unprepared. after all, why worry about it while sleeping if i'm doing them both while awake?