Into the Wild

This morning my alarm was most unwelcome at 8. I had to drag my body out of bed, to the table, where I checked that my exam was at 10. The sheet says it's tomorrow. I find it hard to believe, as my timetable is firmly in my head, and it's today. But I have to believe the blue official-ness of the paper. I go back to bed, now only worried as to whether the shock will have made me unable to sleep. I doze for a while then sink into strange vivid dreamworld.

I am taking a party of fellow students to visit another student's house. Her father is going to pick us up from the train station. We arrive, and mill around with the hundreds of other people there, some of them other people I know. My phone rings and it's Jason, who is the brother of the person we've come to visit (at least in the dream, in real life he's the brother of a friend of mine from years back). I say "where are you" and he replies "look in the mirror". There being no mirror in sight, I look behind me, but he says, "no, look in the mirror". Then he says nothing more, but I hold the phone to my ear still, listening to the faint white noise.

Blessed Relief

People told me that I would probably do better in my exams than I thought I would. After my second (of seven) exams this morning, I'm beginning to think they were right. I've already had the two I was most worried about, and I think I did ok. When I had attempted past papers at home, I had been pretty stumped. The papers did not just highlight some areas where my knowledge was lacking, the whole glorious fraud of my student career seemed brilliantly illuminated.

Perhaps these papers were harder than those of the last couple of days, perhaps the last minute cramming I did managed to fill the voids. But I suspect a large factor was my sheer inability to muster any kind of excitement about doing the mock exams, whereas the real things carry some power to wake me up and shine light into the dark corners of my knowledge.