Keoruac Describes my Dream

 I'm reading Jack Kerouac's Desolation Angels and found this description of a reoccurring dream I myself had, but beautiful described in his book:

"And said in that bright early morning wry voice of college boys, I see them on campuses in the mornings of September with their fresh cashmere sweaters and fresh books crossing dewy swards and making jokes just like that, their pearly faces and pristine teeth and smooth hair, you'd think youth were nothing but this kind of lark and nowhere in the world any grubby bearded youths grumbling in wood shacks hauling water with a flatulent comment - no, just fresh sweet youngsters with fathers who are dentists and successful retired professors walking longstrided and light and glad across primordial lawns towards interesting dark shelves of college libraries - aw hell who cares, when I was a college boy myself I slept till 3 p.m. and set a new record at Columbia for cutting classes in one semester and am still haunted by dreams of it where finally I've forgotten what classes they were and the identities of the professors and instead I wander forlornly like a tourist among the ruins of the Colosseum or the Pyramid of the Moon among vast 100-foot-high shelled haunted abandoned buildings that are to ornate and too ghostly to contain classes - Well, little alpine firs at 7 a.m. don't care about such things, they just exude dew."

I wish he were alive so that I could mail him and say to him I have the exact same dreams. I have a schedule and cannot find my classes - sometimes there are other students and sometimes the strange campuses Kerouac describes are empty and beautiful; but the dread is there all the same. I didn't skip classes like he did though - maybe he would have found solace in the fact that stress dreams from college are not from his truancy but from all the pressures college brings to a person whether or not they attended class. The late nights spent studying in the college campus gave me a stress disorder and reading this was cathartic.