For the love of Pete, make it stop. Please make it stop.

No, this is not a column about the Fed monetizing the debt again or another Lindsay Lohan arrest. We’ll save those for another day.

I’m talking about a reoccurring dream in which I’m returning to the campus of Delta State to sign up for an unnamed class that I forgot to take.

My years at Delta State happened in mid-90s, when I was 20 and e-mail was awesome, and rassler Sting and his black bat were whooping the boys from the New World Order every Monday night.  

I am now 37, closing in on 40 really quick, and Jerry Lawler and his heart are older than Methuselah.   
I have a wife named Shannon and a youngun named Jackson, with another one on the way (a child, not a wife). I’ve got a full-time job and a mortgage, and grass that constantly needs cutting. I don’t own an I-Pod and my automobile wasn’t even manufactured this century.

I don’t have time to go back to Cleveland to sit through one class, 15 years after I graduated.

But I keep dreaming that I’m lost or running late for my one class, or I’m sitting alone in a dorm room missing my wife and child an hour away.    

I’m told back-to-school dreams are common according to the “Dream Doctor” on the Internet.

Apparently someone named “Cheryl” from New York City already found the unnamed Dream Doctor online and inquired about her own “failure to graduate” dreams.

Never one to answer your dream questions too quickly, the Dream Doctor first makes you take an online quiz — I mean, why not take a test when you’re having nightmares about school — to guess what the back-to-school dreams symbolize. Your choices are:

A. Guilt about not having done better in school

B. Current waking life challenges

C. A yearning for the good old days, regardless of how difficult they were

The obvious answer is “A,” since the point of the back-to-school dream is that somebody in the main office was dumb enough to consider us a qualified graduate.  

Another viable answer is “C,” since I often ponder about that Bon Jovi t-shirt I wore to band camp in 1989.

But the correct answer is “B” according to the Dream Doctor. He explains to Cheryl and the rest of us:

Curiously, back to school dreams do not reflect a desire to return to school, nor do they reflect emotional trauma from our school years. Instead, the dreams reflect challenges in our current life—usually in a career or social context—about whether or not we will “graduate to the next level.”
What the heck does that mean?

“Back to school dreams occur when we are stressed about completing a project at work,” the Dream Doc explained, “or if we are switching careers, experiencing money problems, or are trying to ‘graduate’ to a new position in our romantic lives.”

I’m still re-reading that explanation. There are always “projects” at the newspaper, because somebody’s always doing something worth writing about. The worst money problems occurred in college when I was flat broke.

And I’ll leave it up to you, dear reader, to interpret what the Dream Doc means by graduating to a “new position” in romance.

All I know, Doc, is that Tuesday night I dreamed I was back at South Panola High School to take a missed class with teenagers who were born the same year Sting was whooping the NWO.

The dream gets worse. In the same back-to-high-school dream, my classmates Eddie Reed and John Fowler were camped out near the office signing up ’93 graduates for our 20-year reunion in 2013. So it was understood that I had to take the missed class in order to graduate in order to qualify to go to the reunion.

I prefer the more simple explanation for my dreams: please God, don’t ever send me back to school ever again. I like earning a paycheck way too much and don’t ever want to see parachute pants again.  
But that Bon Jovi shirt sure was cool. And I sure miss Sting and the NWO.