I have arrived!

I have officially joined the ranks of the neurotic and insecure doctoral student! Well, at least that's what I'm calling it.

I had the strangest experience yesterday morning. I dreamt that a professor (who I'll probably never see again) had me (and my family - that was odd) come over to his house for dinner. [Not that odd, it does occasionally happen with people who you work closely with.] But during the course of the evening, he asked me what my fields were for the comprehensives and I was trying to articulate them, thinking on my feet, and having the sense that for the first time, I was trying to clearly spell out what it was that I was doing. Okay, so the weird part was, I'm telling him this in my dream and I wake up thinking the rest of what I was saying. No clear transition - one moment I'm talking in my dream, the next, I'm awake and thinking about the comps.

Now, there's something just a little bit creepy about waking up thinking the comps. Let alone the freakiness of dreaming about it - I've dreamt about tests before, but never about the actual content of what I study.

So, I was really a little weirded out by this experience, thinking that I'd finally stepped off the edge into the gorge of absolute academic geekiness but then I talked to two other students who have survived the comps and they told me they experienced the same thing! One even starting keeping a notebook at the side of the bed for that reason.

So I guess I've arrived. Where it is that I am, I still do not know. All I know is that I'm in good company!