A small bubble in glass or on water.
“Bubbles?”
Puzzled pause.
“Bubbles?”
“Yeah. Bubbles.”
This was the substance of a conversation between myself and a grade school friend as I attempted to describe to him the sensation brewing in my digestive system when I was nervous or experiencing anxiety.
In fact this sensation was virtually constant.
I might further have explicated the slight clenching feeling that turned in my stomach, a sensation others might describe as “that sinking feeling” portending some bad omen.
It was the bubbles, though, that perplexed my friend, and which seemed to require elaboration on my part.
Instead of expounding on the nuances of the bubbles I think I gave up on the topic, which I introduced to explain the back-story behind my status as the throw-up king throughout much of grade school.
The chief culprit behind my seemingly routine barf episodes, I thought, was a digestive tract sensitively tied to my nervous worries, the word “nervous” used not in its cliché sense of ego self-preservation but in the sense of involuntary bodily and mental tics arising in response to earthly matters of unnatural conceit.
The spontaneous vomiting I experienced through school has largely eased as an adult. I can, however, reliably expect to feel that clenching feeling of bubbles in my gut during and after an oft-repeated dream. In this dream I never graduated from college and had to go back to school (nearly 20 years later) to get my degree. In some of these dreams it seems I never even left school, and had been endlessly pursuing a college degree from 1986 to the present.
That dream is based in genuine anxieties I experienced as my college graduation approached in 1990 and it appeared I might not make it out in 4 years. I did graduate in 4 years through the magic of a crafty (and perfectly legitimate) sleight-of-hand called “retroactive credit.” I invoked this trick to bump up some credits on my transcript, and after telling a few friends about it it seemed like everyone was doing it. In fact I’d say quite a number of people in my class who might have otherwise not graduated that year did so after learning about the retroactive credit loophole.
In retrospect it seems the stakes were nowhere near as high as I imagined them at the time. If I came up 2 credits short I would probably have been allowed to be part of the graduation ceremony, though my diploma folder would be empty until I finished a couple of courses either at the school or elsewhere.
It often takes me hours to snap out of that dream after I wake. A half day might pass before I stand up in my mind and announce that it can’t be real, and that I do not have to return to school.
I would think that type of anxiety dream is common enough, but its vividness makes an hours-long impression on my wakened mind, renewing the turgid, bubbling gut-churn that has mostly vanished into my adulthood.
