prophecy?

Sometimes I wonder what dreams mean. Sometimes I have some pretty crazy dreams, and when I wake up I think maybe that means I'm crazy. Pretty awkward things happen in a lot of my dreams, and the truth is that 83% of my waking life is the opposite of comfortable (so why not in my dreams, too?). Don't worry, I'm no Samuel Taylor Coleridge - I don't write famous poems from my opium dreams. But if you were completely honest I think you could say that at least once in your life you've dreamed about something that eventually happened. This sorta happened to me this week. Not exactly, but kinda. So here I present to you a simple, first person account of dream interpretation.

Part 1 - The Dream:
Thursday morning I hit snooze on my alarm clock and went back to sleep for about an hour. This is usually when the best dreams happen. I think it has something to do with the sleep cycle we learned about in PSY 201. So in my dream the chair of the Arts & Letters Division was receiving an award for "Best Teacher In The World," nominated by my friend Maria for her feat of thoroughly explaining the sublime. All the other professors were seated in hideous blue pupitres (Spanish for student desks) and her husband was cheering "GOOOO DUCHESS!" We call her the Duchess because she's just that cool.

Part 2 - Lucky Find:
Still a little amused at my dream, I got up and checked my iGoogle homepage that displays top news headlines. In two of my English classes we've been talking about the Anglo-Saxons, and what did I find in the news Thursday morning? "Anglo-Saxon treasure found by English farmer." Of course I immediately emailed this link to the Duchess, to which she responded with congratulations for 1) Checking BBC news, and 2) Being aware of world events. Of course I intentionally did neither, I was just trying to check the weather. So we spent a chunk of time in two classes that day looking at pictures of buried treasure! That definitely beats reviewing Old English declension paradigms.

Part 3 - Gold Star:
We just had a test in one of those classes. I got an A and a friendly note that said "This is definitely a Gold Star test. Good job." I know the test was graded beforehand, but I don't see how all of this could possibly be a coincidence. Clearly the dream was the prologue to the first good day of my semester, up to which point every day has been almost excruciating. I literally felt like Tinker Bell had sprinkled me with pixie dust and taken me to Never Land.

So tell me, what do dreams mean? Do they have anything to do with reality? Do they tell the future? Do they give insight into our subconscious? Or maybe I should start getting up with my alarm clock.