Writing Class in Dream Land

I had a dream last night that I was in a fiction writing class for youth of some indeterminate age, late high school/early college/middle school. Perhaps all three age groups. Mind you, I wasn't teaching the class, I was in it, at the back of the room. I was at least ten years younger than myself: not exactly myself ten years ago, but a strange amalgamation of how I remember myself and how I look in pictures, if that makes any sense.

Our first writing assignment was to write a stand-up comedy routine, We all laughed at the assignment, but our faceless teacher was serious. To master the sudden comedic writing genre was to master all writing.

Perhaps this dream means life is one cosmic joke? An infinite jest, if you will? I think it's telling that I was a student in this dream...

I always enjoyed writing classes. You could make the argument that any kind of lit class I've ever taken was a writing class, as hopefully I absorbed something from each. Sometimes I miss going to school, sitting in a classroom taking notes, trying to crack the fiction code. They say you never stop learning, which is true, but you do stop a certain kind of hopeful searching, I think, as life smacks you around throughout your twenties and beyond. People pay big bucks to get this feeling back in grad school, but I think really it's a ghost of a feeling because by grad school you've probably already realized, deep down, that most of what you have left to learn won't change you or your life much.

I don't miss workshopping my own stories, though!