Do you hear what I hear?

Does anyone out there with a Junior Psychoanalysis kit care to tell me what the "caught unprepared" dream motif means? Please, help me out, because I have this dream at least once a month, and usually all too vividly. It's getting old.

Usually, it's final exam time at college, and I have to take an exam for a class I didn't even know I was registered for and therefore haven't attended all semester. (When the class was Linear Algebra, I woke up in a cold sweat desperately trying to remember matrices.) Or I've messed up the exam schedule somehow and I've missed all my exams.

When I was doing bedside nursing, I had a particularly creepy variation of this dream in which it was 3:00 PM -- time to give report on my patients to the next shift -- and I realized that someone had added a patient to my assignment and hadn't told me, so the patient had not so much as been looked at for eight hours. In the dream, I ran into the room (which had groovy sixties/ seventies rec-room wood paneling) to check on the patient. She assured me she was all right. The really unnerving thing was that the patient in the dream was a real patient whom I'd helped care for in the past -- before she died. She had been worn out with the complications from her surgery and her already poor health, and had just given up the will to live. She had been dead some months already when she appeared in my dream, just as sweet as I remembered her: "Oh, honey, don't worry about it. I'm okay."

So last night I'm in some kind of audience, like in an arena, and we're singing Christmas carols, and suddenly there's a spotlight on my face and a microphone right in front of me and I'm supposed to do a spontaneous solo -- the next verse of "Do You Hear What I Hear?" I was supposed to sing the verse about what the king says to the shepherd boy.

Well, I was totally Caught Unprepared. I got through, "Said the mighty king to the shepherd boy..." but I could not remember what came next. We took an intermission and I fled to an office to search forsome sheet music. I pulled at people's coat sleeves, asking if they had a laptop, begging to use it to hook up to the Internet for a minute to find the stupid lyrics.

I woke up right before I had to go back to the auditorium, and it took me a long time to realize that I'd woken up. I had to stop myself from jumping up and running downstairs at 4:00 AM to look up the lyrics.

Now that I've gotten a chance to look at them, I see that there is no verse where the mighty king directly addresses the shepherd boy. So I'm off the hook.

There is, of course, the final verse in which the king exhorts his people to pray for peace, because the Child, the Child, sleeping in the night, He will bring us goodness and light, etc. I wonder which king the songwriters were thinking of? Did they forget that there really was a king, and that his name was Herod?

Great, here I am fisking Christmas carols! Well, I might as well do the whole Scrooge and reflect that if I had to have my sleep interrupted by dreaming about a Christmas carol, I wish it had been over a cool carol, like being asked to sing O Holy Night in French or something like that, instead of some silly song about some made-up king and a talking lamb. Do You Hear What I Hear is not on my short list of favorite songs. Other Christmas songs I can do without: The Little Drummer Boy, Frosty the Snowman, Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree, and those two contemporary ones that our choir insists on doing every week (one has a perky little hook with the lyrics "on the road to Beth! lee-hem!"; the other has Gloria in excelsis Deo in the chorus; both sound like they should be on the soundtracks to videos with stop-action puppets.) Ding-dong Merrily on High is okay with me as long as I don't have to sing it.