Where did I put that diploma?

When I woke up this morning, I had a compelling urge to track down my college diploma to make sure I had one.

It was a dream that made me doubt something earned more than 20 years ago. When the alarm clock went off this morning, it thankfully interrupted a dream that I was back in college trying to finish my degree.

I was apparently even slower at my slumbering education pace than I was in real life. I was a sixth year senior in the dream and seeking out an adviser, because I had no clue what classes I still needed to take to finish up. I only hoped I could finish it in one academic year.

In another part of the dream, or perhaps it was a different dream all together, I woke up (in the dream) on a sleeping porch, presumably at a fraternity. (The fraternity I was in during college had rooms on 2nd and 3rd floors where everyone assigned to each given floor slept in bunk beds. The windows were always left open even in winter, and the room was not heated or air conditioned).

A sleeping porch in a sorority. The ones my fraternity had in
college were nowhere near this nice or decorated.

I woke up on the sleeping porch and turned on a TV that was along a wall, between bunk beds, past my feet. It was quite an insensitive thing to do because people were still sleeping. But apparently I really wanted to watch something on TV.

The dream(s) made me uncomfortable for some reason. I found myself trying to convince me groggy mind that I already had a diploma. I was pretty sure it was on top of the refrigerator. But when I was fixing breakfast and brewing coffee, I look up on top of the refrigerator and the diploma was not there. The doubt returned.

Lately, my dreams seem to take me back in time. Perhaps there is some sort of unfinished business back there. A common theme is that I have accepted a job at a former workplace. I am either on the interview and offered the job while I'm there or I'm checking in at the office when I arrive back in town and something happens that pulls me in to a meeting or into working early. I am not prepared to start yet, but dive in anyway. Some of the people there, those who weren't there when I worked there before, wonder what the hell I am doing and why I am there. And the people that do know why I am there are too preoccupied to tell anyone what I'm doing there.

I don't know what any of these dreams mean. Maybe I need a dream interpreter. A website on dream interpretation, www.dreammoods.com, says on a page about recurring dreams that:

 "The repetitive patterns in your dream reveal some of the most valuable information about yourself. It may point to a conflict, situation or matter in your waking life that remains unresolved or unsettled. Some urgent underlying message in your unconscious is demanding to be understood."

Obviously I'm not getting the message.