Time to feed the night mares

The good news is that I've finished my grading for this semester!

The bad news is that I've already starting having nightmares about next semester's classes.

Apparently my subconscious mind has washed its hands, so to speak, of this semester's anxieties and has moved on to the next set, attempting to work through some issues related to my Later American Novel class while I sleep. In my dream I'm struggling mightily to teach Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man in a room equipped with a whiteboard but no markers, a chalkboard but no chalk. Even worse, I have to share the room with a horse auction. I'm trying to draw a diagram of the novel's narrative scheme (difficult enough in a normal classroom--you try it!) but I keep bumping into the mangiest, scrawniest, most spavined hunks of horseflesh that ever set foot in a college classroom, and I have to yell so my far-flung students can hear me over the persistent bark of the auctioneer.

The good news is that I'm not teaching Invisible Man next semester and that despite our current classroom space crunch, it's unlikely that I'll be asked to share a classroom with a horse auction even if such an event should ever occur on our campus. In fact, I've never actually encountered a horse on our campus, particularly in an upstairs classroom, so there's no real need to spend my sleepy-time trying to determine the best practices for horse-auction pedagogy. Nevertheless, that's how my mind occupies itself while I sleep.

The good news is that I finally woke up.

The bad news is that a bunch of mangy horses followed me and I don't know what to feed them.