Dreams and nightmares

Last night, I dreamt about Clarion.  To my knowledge, I’ve never actually dreamt about the workshop before, only daydreams.  But last night was an honest dreamy-type dream.

It was an anxiety dream, I think.  I was walking around campus in my underwear, holding my daughter’s hand.  I think that’s a symbol of feeling anxious about leaving her for that amount of time.  I also dreamt about driving a car over a very unstable bridge, an image I suspect designed to remind me that it may still be difficult for me to get there.  

There was other stuff: meeting WotF winners there (which seems unlikely since Jordan suggested he was the first winner to go to CW after his win), trying to write a story with pencil and paper, a play being performed about writers at Clarion (in which the character modeled after me was inexplicably shirtless), and other stuff I can’t remember.  

Why is this dream hitting me now?  I wasn’t even writing anywhere near bedtime last night.  Maybe it was my guilty conscience telling me  should have been writing if I want to attend this summer.  Or maybe I just needed a new setting for the age-old in-public-in-my-underwear dream.  Whatever the reason, it has the workshop foremost in my mind again.  It can make focusing on mundane tasks — like school — very difficult.