Just woke up from a...not exactly a nightmare, but a bad dream. In the dream, I was attending the first day of a new term in JC, but the classroom was a classroom from my primary school. The dream took a bad turn when the first two periods were double maths. Funny thing was that my econs teacher was teaching the first period together with a random guy teacher. And, true to form, I didn't do the homework that they were going through in class. I even told my teacher "I didn't expect you to go through it today". There was something about permutations and combinations, which my econs teacher explained using the example of grouping students from different schools into classes in her tuition centre. The guy teacher tried to explain some answer using the commutative property of multiplication, ie. x times y is the same as y times x. Is that the correct term? I don't even know. Quick check on Wikipedia says it's the right term. I'm shocked!

The second period of maths was taken by my regular maths teacher. Apparently, she'd assigned homework too, and I didn't do it either. I remember her saying something like "A-levels are coming soon! You need to work harder!" To which I was thinking 'but I already have a PhD, why am I worrying about A-levels?' So there was some self-awareness in the dream. In fact, I also remember thinking that most of my classmates there already had university degrees, and questioning why we were even attending JC. So, when the teacher asked who was not going to take the exam, I was the first one to opt out. I do remember thinking that it would be nice to have another certification under the new syllabus, but ultimately realized that my grades would be worse than what I'd already got.

There was another funny conversation, where the teacher asked one of my classmates how he thinks he'll do for the exam. My classmate replied "Oh, probably Bishan standard" and further defined that to be an A. I guess it was because he was a raffles boy. Funny thing is I've never used that term, or heard it being used by anyone before.

It's rare that I remember my dreams in such detail, and for such a relatively long time after waking up. Still, it's not very deep content. That will hopefully come tonight. I want to talk about responding to bad news.