Your School-Inspired Nightmares, Decoded

At least once a month, it happens: we bolt upright in bed, drenched in a cold sweat. We've had The Nightmare again. You might have it, too: You get to school naked and realize you have an exam you haven't studied for in a class you forgot you had, and then suddenly you're in the school play but you never learned the lines and you have to go on, like, NOW! And then the talking aardvark (possibly the world's most terrifying creature) comes in and asks you to the prom, but it's not an aardvark all of a sudden, it's the brother of that kid you used to carpool with. (Or is that just us?)

After a great deal of thought, we think we've cracked the meaning behind these school-inspired night terrors:

Your nakedness in public represents the vulnerability you feel after exposing your deepest, darkest secrets to a World Wide Web of strangers on SparkLife.

The exam can be interpreted in two ways: it stands for your anxiety about failing, or it stands for your fear of the letters used in multiple choice questions due to an unfortunate incident with alphabet soup when you were younger.

You forgot the class like you forgot to feed Squeaky, the class hamster, when you brought him home in kindergarten and then had to buy a new one and try to pass it off as the old one, and the teacher must have known because she never let you go first in show-and-tell again.

The school play represents your desire to make the first comment on SparkLife posts, and the lines you never learned represent the frustration you feel when you think you got the first comment but then are embarrassed to discover you were actually second, even though you wrote "FIRST!!!!!!!! OMG!! Yay!"

The aardvark is your gym teacher, and your carpool friend's little brother is actually an aardvark.

Or everyone in the dream is really you. We've heard that, too. Paging Dr. Freud!

Do you have any school-related nightmares?