Rip Van Reverie

Last night I had a dream of a kind I don't think I had ever had before. As is true in waking life, I was in the final semester of my masters program. The only difference was that I was fifty-six years old, not twenty-nine. And I knew this in the dream to be a new and unpleasant reality. I thought, "Wow, I'm not going to get a real chance to make a career out of this." I looked back on my life and was surprised that quite so much had passed before I found what I wanted to do. I could have sworn it was only a couple of years that I spent figuring things out, but it turned out to have been nearly a lifetime. It all seemed to have happened behind my back, and yet I didn't question it. And that's how the dream was; no action transpired, just me sitting there awash in my realization that twenty-seven years just sort of flew by.