Horrible dream

I had a horrible dream last night. One of those dreams that is basically a nightmare: it wakes you up in the middle of the night and leaves such a deep impact on you that it still affects your mood and emotions when you get up the next morning. 

It was in the context of meeting, or running into, a group of ex-students who graduated (Bachelor’s Degree) with me a couple years ago. At a certain point in the dream, one of them who hasn’t decided yet whether he’s going to pursue a graduate degree said that he had stopped at his Bachelor’s because of how some professors had treated him; then he eventually told me that “some professors” was me and that he had stopped at his Bachelor’s because the way I had behaved with him made him feel like he wasn’t smart enough to pursue an advanced degree. 

I was so deeply hurt (& partly surprised) that I was left speechless. 

Then, even in my dream, I remember thinking clearly to myself: of all the “successes”, i.e. positive experiences and wonderful feedback from students, the one experience that really sticks with me is this one, unique “failure”. And it hurts so profoundly that the pain is almost physical and quite unbearable (although I know it to be only in my head, the expression of some deep fear of mine and probably not really what the ex-student thinks).