I had returned to college and was trying to find a reception on the second floor of a building, but there were no stairs that I could discover. I came across a long line of students who might have been waiting to get into the reception, but I needed to bypass them.

I found some concrete stairs flanked by dirt banks, but students appeared and began painting them black. I attempted to climb the dirt banks, but was not strong enough. When the students noticed my efforts, they silently began painting them, too. Who paints dirt banks? I thought, wondering why everything was tacitly against me.

I remembered that I had returned to college for three quarters and had missed most of the first quarter’s offerings. I vowed to do better, but that meant the money, thousands of dollars, had been wasted already. I tried to explain this to friend I met, along with my horrible feelings of guilt. As I came closer to waking up, I asked myself why the degree I earned 25 years ago was not good enough for me, and a voice — my own? — asked, “Did you really earn it?”