In the dream I am younger, foolish, or maybe just in an alternate timeline. I am in college and for the first few weeks of the semester I keep missing a class because of some sort of social group attached to another class.

The repeated absences from the business economics class worry me, weigh on my mind, but I am actively choosing the warm, group project participation over a class I have registered for but have never attended. The idea of contacting the professor never enters my mind.

Finally, I decide I must go.

As I walk to the neglected business economics course, I see the group games people wrapping up a session. They are energized and talking to each other while I trudge off to face the uncomfortable unknown.

As I walk, I worry. Will I be able to catch up? What assignments have they completed? Will the professor have noticed I am missing? My concerns fill my mind.

Just outside the room, I can hear the professor tell the class to get out their graphing calculators—there is a test today!

I feel totally unprepared. No graphing calculator, I rifle through a bin to find scratch paper for a test as my heart sinks.

I walk into the room and approach the professor, who seems to know who I am despite my habitual truancy. I begin to try to explain myself—

“Hello, I am registered for this class…”

He cuts me off, sternly—

“Not as of today you are not.”

I am flooded with relief, but still worried. Do I need to confirm with the registrar that I have been dropped from the course? Will there be an academic penalty? Why have I paid for a course I did not attend?

Walking back, puzzling over the purloined business economics class, I see my fellow students engaging in a group activity.

They are arranging packaged snacks like sticky buns, coffee cakes, and Twinkies on folding tables so that an unseen cohort can sample them.

The contrast is stark. A minority group of students is facing a rigorous test, while most appear to be setting out and sampling junk food.

My last thought before the dream is over—

This is college? How strange.