"Meritocrat's nightmare"

The fact that Chicago starts so late means that I find myself concerned that I've missed the start of the schoolyear--everywhere I look there are children in school uniforms, teenagers with textbooks, etc. I actually dreamed the other night (well, late morning) that I had a history class that had started at noon, with a paper due, and that it was, I believe, 12:43, and there was no way I could get there on time. The worst part of the dream was the vividness of the image of the folder in which all the materials I needed to write this paper had accumulated over the weeks I'd been neglecting work for this class. It was a relief, then, to wake up, well past when the "class" had begun, needless to say, and realize that no such class existed.

According to Samuel Freedman of the Times, what I experienced was a "meritocrat's nightmare." A person who has achieved his or her status through hard work and intelligence will have such dreams, whereas a person whose position in life is one he or she was born with would not. "Clinically speaking, the dream of forgetting to take a final exam, or of forgetting to attend a course until that fateful day, does not qualify as a nightmare because it does not wake the sleeper. Yet, like any recurrent fear, it tells a society something about itself...With so much riding on academic performance, then, a companion set of anxieties took up residence in the subconscious, as not only innumerable dreamers but the psychiatrists and psychologists who study sleep and dreams are keenly aware."

Huh. While I'd like to think hard work and intelligence have played some role in bringing me to where I am today, there's a certain irony in the fact that I had this "meritocratic" noctural experience while sleeping till about 1 P.M.