A recurring nightmare

Sometimes I think that all my imagination is stolen and channeled entirely into my dreams. There are moments when I dream of incredible things, like entire short films with well-defined characters and plot twists worthy of a screenplay. Other times I dream of ideas and concepts that, when awake, I would never have even been able to conceive.

It is as if, during sleep, a part of me that I do not know emerges. A part that is decidedly more intelligent and creative.

However, there is one dream, or perhaps it would be more accurate to call it a nightmare, that returns with a certain regularity. I started having it in the last five years and what I find truly unusual is that it never presents itself in the same way. It changes every time, while always revolving around the same theme: school.

Last night I had it again. I dreamed I was at school and couldn’t study. More precisely, I dreamed that there was a deadline, an oral exam, something important of which I had, however, completely lost track.

In these dreams I relive, with an almost disturbing clarity, what my adolescence at my desk was like. The teachers who, for some reason, seemed to have it in for me. Me being considered a problematic kid just because I couldn’t memorize that inhuman amount of information that I always considered useless.

One of my greatest flaws is precisely this. If my brain classifies something as useless, it simply cannot retain it. I don’t memorize dates, I don’t memorize names. But above all, I don’t memorize what does not arise from my own spontaneous curiosity. If someone forced me to study something I didn’t choose to delve into, I could almost guarantee that that information would never find a place in my mind.

This way of being and storing information has penalized me enormously, both at school and in everyday life. Sometimes it can even seem like a selfish or unsympathetic attitude.

At school, everything was extremely difficult. In the early years, in elementary and middle school, I was a model student.

The problems emerged towards the end of high school, when my brain began to realize that it found happiness elsewhere, in activities that made me feel good and that really managed to stimulate me.

I often came home from school with one fixed thought: to sit in front of the PC and do something creative, like developing a small video game with GameMaker or dedicating myself to drawing. At a certain point, however, even that was no longer enough. The stress I had accumulated had become such that the only things capable of keeping me from suffering were video games.

Even today, I consider the high school period the worst moment of my life.

Last night I dreamed exactly all of this. The fear of going blank. The fear of seeing everyone else doing well while I struggled. The lump in my throat that I feel when someone is disappointed in me (and also I in myself). The fear of being alone. The fear of remaining trapped in there forever.

I also remember the mocking phrases of the teachers, spoken in a veiled way, perhaps because that way they managed to feel less guilty when they humiliated me. I remember the criticisms of other classmates, who often pointed me out as a lost cause, someone present only by inertia, without a real reason for being.

I also remember, however, that when no one knew how to solve an computer science problem, everyone came to me to get help.

I remember all this every time I have this dream and I feel lost again.

Then I wake up, short of breath but also with the relief of knowing that what I was experiencing was only a dream and that by now I have nothing left to worry about.

Yet that trauma has remained.

I still feel the anxiety in the morning. The anxiety of not being enough. The anxiety of not making it.

Perhaps it will accompany me for my whole life.

Today I am a system administrator for an important leading company in the sector. I have my hobbies, my passions, and a life built around what I love to do.

I could consider it a victory against those who tried to bring me down. I could think that I have taken my revenge.

And yet, despite everything, I cannot feel that I have won anything.