I have a persistent dream in which I’m forced to return to school. It’s the real me, at my real age, after getting my real degree. I get a letter that says I’ve been missing lessons, and unless I want my parents to be arrested, I should come to school.
Last night I had to sit a history test. (It was helpfully written in Latin.) The teacher kept lecturing me that, just because I’d spent ten years in higher education, I wasn’t too special to obey the law and go to school.
I woke up from the nightmare paralysed with despair of failing the test, and tried to calm myself with how I wished the dream would have gone if I could have directed it.
Instead of taunting me, the teacher would have been sympathetic. Of course, it was hard to become a schoolgirl again, to obey the rules imposed by grown-ups when you’ve been a grown-up yourself for a while.
It was hard, but I still had to obey the law; to come to lessons when I was told, to do the homework, to keep my cheeky remarks to myself. He would help me as much as he could. But if he thought I was being obstinate…
Here he would pause significantly, and flick a look into the corner of the classroom, where one of my friends would be standing with her skirt up, her spanked bottom facing the class. “I won’t enjoy doing it, but I will, if I think you need it. I will spank you, for your own good.”
But the dream didn’t go like that. Maybe next time. If I have to tread the dreamland as a schoolgirl again, I might at least have a spanking to make up for it.