Teaching in China - What a Crazy Dream I Had.

Before I get to the dream, let me just firstly say that I've been at my placement school for a week now, and a a part of me had been regretting the decision to choose 'No Preference' for where I was placed in China, what age group I taught, and the English level of the learners I would teach.  I'd even contemplated being asked to be moved to a different school.  Facebook friends have all told me just to 'hang in there', which I'm trying my best to do, but after I laid on the couch in my room early this afternoon, I had a dream that made me realise...

Sometimes it takes the most vivid dreams in our deepest sleep to show us just how much it is that we need to 'wake up'....

I was looking at the piece of paper which had my placement on it and noticed that it had two, the first being a shorter stay than the second, so I went along with all the other TEFL interns who were leaving the day that my shorter placement had finished, and we all got onto to some weird crazy suspended bunk beds.  Where are we? I wondered to myself.  Are we on modified shipping containers to be shipped out around China? Then, a familiar type of shunting feeling - we were on a train.  We were at the very back, and looked out the large window as we watched the town disappear in the distance.

My mum started talking to her sister (my auntie) and my (deceased) cousin, Stuart, about her placement - Wait.  What's Mum doing here? She always said she'd 'wring their little necks' if she ever became a teacher.  And yet there she was, quite calmly talking about where she was going to be placed and that she hadn't yet started.  She also mentioned that Joanne, my sister, had willingly missed the train, and she had some washing to hang out. What? I was then struck with an image of my sister hanging out some washing on a windy day.  How strange.

As I listened to my mum talk, I started to realise something - I'd read my placement sheet wrong and wasn't supposed to be on that train at all.  Is it a one-way trip, or will there be stops where I can get off and go back? The train made a few stops and I panicked more and more with each passing stop, desperately trying to talk myself into getting off the train and go back when I suddenly burst into tears.  "I miss those kids, I really miss them" I say in a panicked blubber.  "I don't actually like most of them, but there's a few really good kids there that I'm really going to miss.  I have to go back, I just have to!"

I woke up suddenly, slightly shocked and ultimately relieved that it was nothing more than a dream; a dream I contemplated the deeper meaning of after having awoken from it, as I do now typing this, coming to the conclusion that it is trying to tell me one thing above all else: "Wake up to yourself, Ian.  Wake up." (Or, you know, something along those lines, anyway). ;-)

What do you think?

- End.