When I was very young, I had two recurring dreams. In the first, I played with a jack-in-the-box at my grandparents' house in Manhattan, Kan. When the box blew open, a big hand of some sort scooped me up and threw me down the gutter of their driveway. In the second, I stood at the entrance to my neighbor's basement (in Salina, Kan.) and saw lots of pink spiders (of a daddy longleg vintage). Sometimes my mom or someone else was trapped by the spiders, sometimes not. I really can't remember much more than the pink spiders (which occasionally performed the Farrell's Ice Cream Parlor jingle).

These were somewhat scary dreams, but I don't remember waking up and screaming when I had them (though my parents might have better memories than me). In fact, I have very few disturbing dreams at all.

But there's one that still drops by every now and again. I'm in high school (sometimes my actual high school, but usually one that is unfamiliar to me). I am very aware that I have a college degree and am much too old to be in high school. But there I am, making "better choices." I drop band and take astronomy, or I get out of the math fast track and take acting (astronomy and acting, of course, were unavailable at my real high school). Everything is going well. Throughout the semester (and I get an entire semester or full year into a single dream) I always skip one class. A necessary one, like history or English. Usually, it's history. And the end of the semester (or year) looms. I need to pass the class in order to graduate and get on with my life, but I haven't been to the class at all. Can I convince the teacher to just give me the grade? Can I somehow take a test that will let me "pass out" of the class? What am I gonna do?

I wake up.

That one leaves me in a cold sweat. I'm sure you're sitting back reading this going, "That's nothing. I have that walking around school naked dream, and that's a lot worse than skipping some dumb class." Maybe for you it is. I've had the walking around school naked dream myself, and I always enjoy it. But, see, that's just me.

The implication of this dream is that I'm forgetting something, and it's going to catch up with me sooner than late. Maybe I'm not picking hints up from me wife about something, or I've completely forgotten about some huge project at work. I just don't know.

But no such thing has really happened. Until today.

More like Friday. On Friday, I meant to put up the latest Aiding & Abetting issue. Forty reviews of the latest in obscure music. In case you're curious, Amen, the Elysian Fields, Movietone and Voodoo Glow Skulls all score highly. I mean, I did most of the work and had everything ready to put it up. I told lots of people that it would be up this weekend. And I left for a camping trip thinking that I had, indeed, put the reviews on the site.

The problem is, I hadn't. Somehow, I just blanked. When I got home today, I scooted around to do a little pre-column snooping and I discovered that the site looked the same way it did on Thursday. Bad. Very bad.

So I scrambled and typed and bashed the stuff onto the site. Just in time for my Monday deadline.

That's not so bad, I hear you say. You got it done on time.

Yes, I did. But I still couldn't help but think of that dream while I was scratching away, trying to do five hours worth of work in two.

I don't think that dreams can predict the future. But they just might be telling you something interesting about yourself.

Jon Worley skipped his freshman psychology final, attending a Tesla/Def Leppard concert instead. He attributed his absence to the supposed death of a grandfather and took a make-up test.