Naked in Front of a Classroom

Sometimes the pressure of a limited vocabulary forces poetry. To teach English as a foreign language is to encounter some strange and fantastic uses of words.

After reading a text, one of my students asked the meaning of "nightmare". I'm learning to apply the Tao in my classrooms, and there's an idea that you will accomplish everything if you do nothing at all. So, instead of answering the question, I asked if anyone else in the class knew what "nightmare" means.

Poetry:

A nightmare is an insect that crawls into your brain while you are sleeping.

I regret that I had to clarify that diamond of a definition. My mundane definition made me feel like a hack grammar Nazi without the poetic faculty of imagination, whereas the original definition certainly would have made Kafka proud.