Interesting dream
Apr. 3rd, 2026 09:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shivverWell, interesting to me, anyway. Probably not interesting to you. But this is my journal and I want to make sure I remember it, so here it is.
Unfortunately for you, if you care to read this, it requires a lot of backstory.
When I graduated from high school, I went to one of the best universities in the U.S., Caltech. It's devoted to science and engineering (the only non-technical degrees it offered was history and literature, though those were history and literature of science, and even those students were required to take the basic curriculum of two years of physics and math and one year of chemistry) and it's very difficult to get into. It's also very difficult to make it through and graduate from -- at the time, a freshman class was about 300 students (that's smaller than my high school graduating class) and fewer than 100 students were expected to earn a degree. You have to be not only smart, but also dedicated and motivated, in order to succeed.
The thing is, I am neither dedicated nor motivated. I never have been. I thought I was, back when I was seventeen, and I really wanted to be a scientist, but I certainly didn't know myself back then. When it came down to actually studying and doing science, I never actually did. (Well, okay, I did do some. I did make it through my chemistry classes, and I got a research fellowship in the summer after my freshman year). I managed to last a year and a half at Caltech before failing out.
But I loved the place. I loved being immersed in a technical world, where you could walk into any lab and talk to the people there about their science. I loved that the people there -- professors and students -- were passionate about what they were doing and shared that passion with you.
And I loved the student society. Rather than living in dorms, we lived in "houses" which were patterned loosely on the houses in British boarding schools -- think Hogwarts houses, where the students choose to be because they're similar (rather than being randomly put into a dorm by some administrator) and they spend their entire academic life with their house "family". I was in Dabney House, and while I haven't actually interacted with any of those people in decades, the house nickname "Darb" still means a lot to me. I am a Darb, more so than I was a Techer.
I can't really say I learned much about myself from my time at Caltech, because I made the same mistake again, after getting my bachelor's, by going to grad school with the intention of getting a Ph.D. in chemistry. You'd think I'd have realized that I just wasn't the right temperament, but I'd always wanted to be a scientist and thought that's what I needed to do. My mom knew it, though. Moms always know. She tried to dissuade me from going to grad school, tried to tell me that I didn't have the drive to succeed in science, but I didn't understand and totally misinterpreted what she was trying to say.
So, off I went to grad school, and I made all the same mistakes again, not applying myself in the same ways. Maybe I might have succeeded if I had chosen the right direction, the direction that I thought looked interesting but didn't seem "technical" enough. (I'd wanted to go into inorganic synthesis but I thought that I really should go into physical chemistry, so I ended up doing atomic force microscopy on single-crystal metals and just wasn't interested.) I didn't actually fail out this time, but I took my master's degree and fled.
I think I've grown a little wiser over the years. For example, I chose to go into software quality assurance because I view it as a science and because I knew that though I could succeed as a developer (and I have done so -- I worked as a developer for a number of years), it's not something that I particularly enjoy (I've never wanted to be an engineer, never wanted to build things) and thus I would find it difficult to work hard at it.
But anyway, back to the actual backstory of last night's dream. One of my greatest regrets in my life is throwing away that opportunity I had at Caltech, that I didn't apply myself and earn a degree there. (Not to mention, my parents wasted a lot of money sending me there. I felt so bad about it that it was the primary reason why I rushed myself through my second college to save them money, graduating in less than three years, and then supported myself through grad school and beyond. I ended up costing them less than my brother (six years in college) and my sister (four years college, two years grad school, four years medical school) had; perhaps I wasn't as successful as either of them, but at least I wasn't as much of a burden on our parents.)
This regret is rather deep-seated and has manifested in a recurring dream which has occurred maybe every two or three months or so for decades -- pretty much ever since I gave up hope that I might return to that school. The details change, but the basic premise of the dream is that I return to Caltech and start taking classes again, in order to earn my degree. I always live in Room 38 in Alley 7 in Dabney House, which was the first room that I lived in when I was there.
(Oddly it's always on the left side of the alley, while the real room is on the right. It's a tiny room, only large enough for a bed and a desk, considering that the closet and chest of drawers were built into the wall. I ended up there because at the time, the male:female ratio at Caltech was 7:1 and the freshmen who joined Dabney that year had only two women. When we were choosing rooms, because most of the available rooms were doubles, the last single rooms were held for the women if they wanted them. The other woman (named Romana; no, she was not named after DW; she was born before Tom Baker became the Doctor) chose to room with two guys in a triple, and when it got to my choice, there was only the smallest single room on campus left, so I took it.)
Anyway, the dream is always about me arriving at Dabney, moving in, and starting to study. I am always only taking two or three classes so that I can concentrate on them. And the dream is almost always only about studying or going to classes -- very little social interaction, though a few people from back then do show up occasionally, usually Danny, Paul R, or the house president, whose name I don't remember but may have also been Paul? Often, the people in Dabney are completely new, which makes sense as all my friends left Caltech a long time ago. Interestingly, I've only seen my best friends, Jeff and yet another Paul, Paul S, once or twice in my dream.
So what was the interesting dream? Last night, I was back at Caltech, studying with a book in front of me and I'm working through a homework problem, and Danny is sitting across the table from me. He said, "You know, you've earned enough credits." And I said, "I can graduate now?" And he said yes. The rest of the dream was me and him walking through campus (which looked surprisingly like the actual campus) and going to pick up my commencement gown and mortarboard (and somehow having to replace my shoes, which fell apart as I walked).
I wonder if somehow my subconscious mind is saying something like my journey is complete, whatever that journey is? I have no idea what it might be, maybe even something as simple as I've worked through my regret. Maybe only now am I really comfortable with not being as dedicated and motivated as people say I should be. But it really does feel like something changed, and that's what made it interesting. I've written this all not only because I do like talking about Caltech and my experience there, but also to record the dream so that if more Caltech dreams happen in the future, I can look back to see when this one happened. Because it seems significant.
(Edit: The house president was Tim. You don't care, but I do.)
Unfortunately for you, if you care to read this, it requires a lot of backstory.
When I graduated from high school, I went to one of the best universities in the U.S., Caltech. It's devoted to science and engineering (the only non-technical degrees it offered was history and literature, though those were history and literature of science, and even those students were required to take the basic curriculum of two years of physics and math and one year of chemistry) and it's very difficult to get into. It's also very difficult to make it through and graduate from -- at the time, a freshman class was about 300 students (that's smaller than my high school graduating class) and fewer than 100 students were expected to earn a degree. You have to be not only smart, but also dedicated and motivated, in order to succeed.
The thing is, I am neither dedicated nor motivated. I never have been. I thought I was, back when I was seventeen, and I really wanted to be a scientist, but I certainly didn't know myself back then. When it came down to actually studying and doing science, I never actually did. (Well, okay, I did do some. I did make it through my chemistry classes, and I got a research fellowship in the summer after my freshman year). I managed to last a year and a half at Caltech before failing out.
But I loved the place. I loved being immersed in a technical world, where you could walk into any lab and talk to the people there about their science. I loved that the people there -- professors and students -- were passionate about what they were doing and shared that passion with you.
And I loved the student society. Rather than living in dorms, we lived in "houses" which were patterned loosely on the houses in British boarding schools -- think Hogwarts houses, where the students choose to be because they're similar (rather than being randomly put into a dorm by some administrator) and they spend their entire academic life with their house "family". I was in Dabney House, and while I haven't actually interacted with any of those people in decades, the house nickname "Darb" still means a lot to me. I am a Darb, more so than I was a Techer.
I can't really say I learned much about myself from my time at Caltech, because I made the same mistake again, after getting my bachelor's, by going to grad school with the intention of getting a Ph.D. in chemistry. You'd think I'd have realized that I just wasn't the right temperament, but I'd always wanted to be a scientist and thought that's what I needed to do. My mom knew it, though. Moms always know. She tried to dissuade me from going to grad school, tried to tell me that I didn't have the drive to succeed in science, but I didn't understand and totally misinterpreted what she was trying to say.
So, off I went to grad school, and I made all the same mistakes again, not applying myself in the same ways. Maybe I might have succeeded if I had chosen the right direction, the direction that I thought looked interesting but didn't seem "technical" enough. (I'd wanted to go into inorganic synthesis but I thought that I really should go into physical chemistry, so I ended up doing atomic force microscopy on single-crystal metals and just wasn't interested.) I didn't actually fail out this time, but I took my master's degree and fled.
I think I've grown a little wiser over the years. For example, I chose to go into software quality assurance because I view it as a science and because I knew that though I could succeed as a developer (and I have done so -- I worked as a developer for a number of years), it's not something that I particularly enjoy (I've never wanted to be an engineer, never wanted to build things) and thus I would find it difficult to work hard at it.
But anyway, back to the actual backstory of last night's dream. One of my greatest regrets in my life is throwing away that opportunity I had at Caltech, that I didn't apply myself and earn a degree there. (Not to mention, my parents wasted a lot of money sending me there. I felt so bad about it that it was the primary reason why I rushed myself through my second college to save them money, graduating in less than three years, and then supported myself through grad school and beyond. I ended up costing them less than my brother (six years in college) and my sister (four years college, two years grad school, four years medical school) had; perhaps I wasn't as successful as either of them, but at least I wasn't as much of a burden on our parents.)
This regret is rather deep-seated and has manifested in a recurring dream which has occurred maybe every two or three months or so for decades -- pretty much ever since I gave up hope that I might return to that school. The details change, but the basic premise of the dream is that I return to Caltech and start taking classes again, in order to earn my degree. I always live in Room 38 in Alley 7 in Dabney House, which was the first room that I lived in when I was there.
(Oddly it's always on the left side of the alley, while the real room is on the right. It's a tiny room, only large enough for a bed and a desk, considering that the closet and chest of drawers were built into the wall. I ended up there because at the time, the male:female ratio at Caltech was 7:1 and the freshmen who joined Dabney that year had only two women. When we were choosing rooms, because most of the available rooms were doubles, the last single rooms were held for the women if they wanted them. The other woman (named Romana; no, she was not named after DW; she was born before Tom Baker became the Doctor) chose to room with two guys in a triple, and when it got to my choice, there was only the smallest single room on campus left, so I took it.)
Anyway, the dream is always about me arriving at Dabney, moving in, and starting to study. I am always only taking two or three classes so that I can concentrate on them. And the dream is almost always only about studying or going to classes -- very little social interaction, though a few people from back then do show up occasionally, usually Danny, Paul R, or the house president, whose name I don't remember but may have also been Paul? Often, the people in Dabney are completely new, which makes sense as all my friends left Caltech a long time ago. Interestingly, I've only seen my best friends, Jeff and yet another Paul, Paul S, once or twice in my dream.
So what was the interesting dream? Last night, I was back at Caltech, studying with a book in front of me and I'm working through a homework problem, and Danny is sitting across the table from me. He said, "You know, you've earned enough credits." And I said, "I can graduate now?" And he said yes. The rest of the dream was me and him walking through campus (which looked surprisingly like the actual campus) and going to pick up my commencement gown and mortarboard (and somehow having to replace my shoes, which fell apart as I walked).
I wonder if somehow my subconscious mind is saying something like my journey is complete, whatever that journey is? I have no idea what it might be, maybe even something as simple as I've worked through my regret. Maybe only now am I really comfortable with not being as dedicated and motivated as people say I should be. But it really does feel like something changed, and that's what made it interesting. I've written this all not only because I do like talking about Caltech and my experience there, but also to record the dream so that if more Caltech dreams happen in the future, I can look back to see when this one happened. Because it seems significant.
(Edit: The house president was Tim. You don't care, but I do.)
no subject
Date: 2026-04-10 12:55 pm (UTC)Aparrently you're supposed to consider your emotions in recurring dreams. Then again, this never came up when I studied psychology, so take this with a pinch of salt.