I have a few recurrent nightmares that clearly indicate when I’m wracked by waking anxieties:

• I desperately need to pee and there are hundreds of available toilets but every stall is tiny, missing its doors, covered in filth, or otherwise unusable. In the course of maneuvering around the obstacles, I end up peeing all over myself.
• One tooth comes loose and falls out, setting off a domino effect in which every other tooth in my mouth drops out, one after another.
• I’m back in high school for my final calculus exam, after cutting class all year. I can’t remember where my locker is located, let alone what the combination is, so I can’t even grab my math book to figure out what will be on the test. I realize that I’ll have to give back my college degree once they find out I failed calculus and never finished high school.

Last night I added a new one to the roster of anxiety dreams:

I was craving a falafel sandwich so I tried to buy one from a food truck. The vendor refused to sell me one. He said that since my records indicated that I hadn’t spoken Hebrew since 2001, I no longer understood it and I’m therefore not allowed to eat falafel. [I think I stole this concept from the Israeli Consulate.] I became enraged at the injustice and started flipping out, at which point the vendor and another guy forcibly removed me. I vaguely remember that my mom was there, happily chatting in Hebrew, munching on falafel, and turning a blind eye to my ejection. I silently cursed myself for not having learned Hebrew the easy way, as a kid.

[I did start and quickly abandon Hebrew Duolingo lessons a few weeks ago so maybe this was not an anxiety dream but rather my brain’s tough love reminder to get back to work?]

[Photo: Insatiable Munch]