For years I’ve been afflicted with “academic anxiety dreams,” which go like this: I have an imminent final exam in college, and either haven’t studied for it, can’t find my way to the exam room, or am late for it. These dreams aren’t as frequent as they used to be (which was almost every night) but they still recur about once a week. But their precise form is always different.
Last night, for instance, I dreamed that I had final exam in introductory biology (the courses vary from dream to dream), but had not been at two lectures and so was missing the notes. During the entire dream—who knows how long they last?—I was wandering about trying to find someone who could give me the notes for those lectures. First I encountered my old college freshman-year roommate, who said he had the notes but then couldn’t find them. I then wandered into another building, and managed to locate someone who also had taken the class, and had the notes. This person, who had fluffy hair like Liberace, had a huge box of very elaborate notes: each lecture’s notes were put in a separate file folder, and pasted on the folder ‘s front was an outline of the lecture on a large blue Post-It note (if you wake up soon after you dream, you can remember many details).
Unfortunately, this person was deeply suspicious of me; he said that he feared that if I studied his notes, I’d do better than he would, and hurt the grading curve. I managed to wheedle the notes out of him anyway, and went back to my dorm to study. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find my dorm, but that’s another story. . .
I used to think that the profusion of these anxiety dreams, all connected with lectures and tests, was my own personal pathology, but over the years I’ve found that many academics have them. My old advisor Dick Lewontin, for instance, said he had the same dream—about being late for an exam—every night for decades.
Now I’m not a diehard Freudian (his Interpretation of Dreams is a real exercise in confirmation bias, as well as a real stretch), but I do think that dreams are more than just random firings of neurons. For reasons we don’t understand, but which I find fascinating, our fears, hopes, and personalities are all massaged by our brain into a coherent story while we’re asleep. Talk about the hard problem of consciousness: what about the even harder problem of where dreams come from?
At any rate, do any other readers out there have academic anxiety dreams? And, of course, if you have any recurrent dream, or simply had a really weird one recently, we’d all be delighted to hear about it.
I have had one for the last week and a half. I submitted my Master’s dissertation on the 15th and have had dreams about forgetting to submit it every night since then. I am always told that I failed my degree because of all the late penalties by s much sterner version of my supervisor and program director.
by *a* much sterner…
I had these kinds of dreams quite often for several years after I was no longer taking classes. I don’t think I’ve had any since I’ve been on the other end of the process. As for other dreams, the most unpleasant are fear of falling dreams. They haven’t abated much and, if anything, my fear of heights has only worsened.
As a kid I often had falling dreams with bouncing soft landings.
Do you ever hit the ground?
Soft landings never even occur to me in my dreams – I hit the ground rarely, and my point of view becomes ‘out-of-body’ at that point. Not much after that.
When I was a kid I often had falling dreams, but I always woke up before I hit the ground. I haven’t had them since childhood.
As a kid, I used to have dreams in which I could levitate by holding my breath. I’d always have to make sure that I was high enough so that I didn’t hit the ground every time I inhaled.
Once I fell into an ocean, hit the bottom of that then fell into hell and only after that woke up.
“…fell into hell”…and here we all are;-)
Damn, that must’ve been surreal.
I’ve tried an avalanche once, but oddly enough that didn’t feel scary. Just a bit cold, but that was it.
I’m evidence that you don’t die when you hit the bottom since I hit several before waking up!
When I have one of those ‘falling’ dreams, some part of my brain that watches everything with cynical detachment says “this is a dream”. Kinda weird.
Yes, I do. About once a month or so since college. And typically I’m somewhat uncomfortable–because I’m not wearing pants.
Same for me, only it was grade school.
Also, I have a recurring dream in which I’ve taken a second job, and can’t remember where it is, or when I’m supposed to work. Sometimes I wake up, still trying to figure it out.
I get the second job dream a few times a year. I’ve never worked two jobs, so I wonder where that comes from.
Not as often these days (20 years out from last exams), but pantless as often as not.
I remember when I had my first no-pants-at-school dream (the year I turned 6). Didn’t find out for years that nearly everyone has the same dream.
Damn, did I say 20?
30.
CAM, the University of Cambridge alum magazine, just had a feature article on this very issue!
My worst dream is that I’m late/haven’t studied for a maths exam in high school, and if I don’t pass it (highly likely even if I had studied and was on time) then all of my subsequent degrees will be invalidated.
Amazing! I have had the same dream for thirty years, once a month or so! All my degrees will be invalidated if I don’t pass a high school maths exam. The feeling of not having studied for the exam is so horrible that I wake up in panic. I sometimes have a variation of this dream: an undergraduate course in English or history, but the high school maths is the most common.
I’ll bet maths are the most common subject of both dreams and nightmares! One of my more memorable recent dreams was of signing up for a math course and not going to any of the classes or tests or quizzes. I just blew it all off, for some reason. I think I remember it only because it was so unpleasant to think I blew something off that I’d committed to do.
I’ve been away from academia for more than thirty years now and I still have this dream in various forms from time to time. More recent versions include my error being off by many hundreds of miles, where I show up late for an exam or a class only to find that I’m not even at the correct university… I’m supposed to be out in Wyoming or somewhere equally distant.
I hate those dreams.
“I’ve been away from academia for more than thirty years now and I still have this dream in various forms from time to time. ”
Same here. I’ve also read about the prevalence of this dream. I’ve not had an interesting wrinkle such as yours added, though; just the traditional ones of sometimes being partly or fully naked.
I don’t think I’ve been naked in my dreams, at least not in these ones.
Your final clause provides ample room for speculation. Would you care to avoid speculation by clarifying in what dreams you are naked? 🙂
Other ones!
(Actually, while I’ve had my share of sex dreams, nakedness doesn’t seem to have been a main feature, memorability-wise.)
Recently I dreamed I was travelling around Adelaide at night looking for something, and knowing I had to get to the Pilbara by the morning. Don’t know where you are, but I bet that’s further than Wyoming.
This was famously called the “Princeton Alumni dream” years ago (decades ago, if I remember correctly) because one alum raised the issue in the alumni publication, and was astonished to learn that virtually everyone had the same dream. It’s verrrrrrry common, and not just among academics.
That’s true because I am not an academic and I have a version of this recurring dream all the time. I find out that I have to take an exam in a class for which I registered but forgot to attend the entire semester. The level of anxiety is very closely pegged to whether or not I’m wearing pants as I frantically run from one room of Anderson Hall (it’s always the same building) to another.
I wonder why most of us have this not wearing pants/undies component to our panicked running around?
Maybe it’s because being naked in public adds to a sense of vulnerability. There was an opening scene on an episode of Star Trek: Voyager where Lieutenant Tuvok reports to the bridge naked, and all he can say is, “Captain, I seem to have misplaced my uniform.” So in the Star Trek universe, it’s not limited to humans.
I’m sure some psychoanalysts could have a field day with that one.
Shame post-Garden of Eden -LOL
Jerry says:
” During the entire dream—who knows how long they last?”
I experience similar dreams. But looking at the clock, I found that some of these complex long-form dreams can only take a minute or so.
From preteenage until about 10 years ago I used to have a reoccurring dream of a fire truck chasing me off a cliff. It used to be frequent but then tapered off and I haven’t had it for a decade now.
Just think about it enough and you may get it back. I’m not helping, am I?
As a just-retired professor whose tenure was more than four decades long, I can attest to the persistence of such dreams. In my case they usually had the following scenario: in the middle of a semester I suddenly remembered that there was one course/class that I hadn’t yet met! In panic, I would set out looking for the classroom, expecting to find a group of students fixed in place there at their desks like so many mummified corpses. But upstairs or down in a building, or from building to building throughout campus (which was always imposingly grand and labyrinthine), I could never find the classroom. . . and gradually drifted from the dream-world into anxious consciousness.
And I know I’m not done with these dreams even though I’m finished with teaching.
“I would set out looking for the classroom, expecting to find a group of students fixed in place there at their desks like so many mummified corpses..”
At this remove that’s pretty funny! 😀
It’s also similar to a scene in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Mine are usually the final exam for a course that I completely forgot to attend.
I tend to have more dreams about the first day of class and being unable to find the correct room.
Me, too, both as a student and teacher. Not so many exam dreams.
Me too. It was years later that I came across an explanation for what triggered it. Seems the EUS had uprooted and switched the nice official wooden signs in the lawns in front of all the buildings where first year classes were being held. I found it in an article detailing the various stunts they had gotten up to over the years.
I have a variation of this dream. Someone tells my final is in an hour, but I don’t remember that I was supposed to be going to that class. I then check papers from the beginning of the semester and find out that I am indeed registered for that class.
The confabulating narrator function of the brain can’t be turned off during dream states. So while the brain is basically reinforcing random memories, the confabulating narrator is busy stringing together a plotline, as plausible as possible given the memories it has to build with.
The confabulating narrator function in the brain won’t tolerate gaps in the plotline.
This is most strikingly demonstrated with experiments with individuals after split brain surgery to treat epilepsy.
I have these sorts of anxiety dreams frequently, and so do other people I’ve talked to about it. They seem to be common, at least among people for whom high academic performance was important when we were younger. In my case, it’s usually some course I’d forgotten I was enrolled in and hadn’t attended classes for, or submitted assignments for, all semester.
A variant is a course that I’d meant to pull out of, but I now can’t find out what the deadline was for doing that. Another variant is forgetting that I’m supposed to perform in a play… and so of course it’s now the opening night and I haven’t learned my lines (how I got to this point without going to rehearsals, who knows?).
I blame university bureaucracy. We had to concentrate to hard on taking the right courses at the right time, finding the courses on campus, etc. etc. that it’s made us all slightly insane. 😀
to = so
As an adolescent, I had a recurring dream where I was climbing a tall ladder. My surroundings were always the same, a white void. When I would reach the top of the ladder, I would discover that there was no structure to support the ladder. Terrified, i would fall backwards, still grasping the top rung. I remember the sensation of falling felt so real! I would always wake right before I hit the ground.
What a fantasically beautiful dream you have created. (And horrifying of course.) It could be made beautifully into a short film on a loop. E.g. like this installation by Rodney Graham. (Of course the youtube quality is awful). Something along those lines…
youtube.com/watch?v=sDxV8wgB-Fc
I have had a recurring dream of having to write an exam for a course for which I had never attended any lectures at all.
I have also had dreams in which I am writing an essay. In the dream, the prose looked fantastic, but I could never remember it upon waking, which was disappointing. I have often thought that this dream was a manifestation of my brain working through issues and arguments and analyzing things that I had read, and that maybe–even if I failed to remember what the dream writing–it helped when I returned to writing the next day. Who knows?
I have a dream that I am on the hook for a class that I’ve never attended. Never. And neglected to drop. Also a variation, in which I owe accumulated rent for every apartment or house I’ve ever rented because I just moved out and never canceled a lease.
I have had other recurring dreams including one in which a load of giant, misshapen catfish come down the steps into my paternal grandparents’ basement, howling all the way down.
Wow, giant howling catfish coming down the basement steps! What an image!
That is something that is hilarious in the real world as we think about it but must be terrifying in the dream. I think it would make a good movie – on par with Day of the Triffids.
Those catfish *are* terrifying. Kinda humanoid. It would make a good movie, but don’t look to me for a plot. There isn’t one.
Sounds like something out of H.P. Lovecraft.
Jerry,
Yes! I had similar dreams frquently in the years after college and they recur from time to time even now, 47 years after graduation. I am interested to learn that even academics as accomplished as you have the same type of dreams. Typically in mine, I arrive for the final but realize that I have not been to class or read any of the books.
Mickey Mantle once related a frequent dream of his after retirement that is a variation on this theme. He would be outside Yankee Stadium and hear his name announced as next to bat but he was always unable to get into the ballpark.
Yes, I intermittently have dreams very much like this. Typically it is late in the semester, and I realize that I haven’t been keeping up on my class work, and so there is no way I am going to pass the final exam. It’s a terrible feeling when you realize that there’s nothing you can really do to get yourself out of the mess you are in. Of course, the plot of the dream typically revolves around me doing whatever I can to not have to accept this conclusion–rushing around for notes, weighing the odds of being able to learn a semester’s worth of Calculus in a day and a half, etc.
Interestingly, the dreams I have are still set in College some time, even though I haven’t been a student in a class for a good long while now. I don’t think I’ve ever had a dream about going to give a lecture or conference talk unprepared, which is much more relevant to my life now.
Glad to know I’m not alone in having been deeply traumatized by my undergrad education 😉
My two recurring dreams involve my military experience in Vietnam and my 33 years of high school teaching.
My military dream usually entails that I am in a war zone and I am explaining that I do not have to be there because I have already served and was wounded. No one listens to me. Violent war news seems to stimulate this one.
My school related dream is that I am looking for books for my students to use in class and I can only find a few of them because they have been moved from where I had placed them earlier. The start of school brings this on. I also serve on the local school committee so local stress aggravates this.
John
I am a medical Doctor (retired) age 74. I still get dreams of imminent finals for which I have done no work. I also dream of beig late for flight take-offs, losing my way, getting stuck in trafic jams on the way to catch a plane, suddenly finding i am naked in public etc etc. I must be traumatised; I blame my parents.
I do. About once every 2 weeks for me. Mine is that I somehow missed taking a course during my undergraduate, the error was found (now a good bit later in my career), and I have to give back my subsequent degrees as the course was fundamental in some way. I don’t believe I ever find out what course I missed though.
Coincidentally I just woke up from one! Is there something in the air? I think they are more common on Sunday nights ( all year) and as September approaches. Last night I couldn’t find History Corner and had to climb over a huge glass wall to get there. The friend I was running to class with disappeared. In this dream I was just going to attend a class, but I’ve had many nightmares in my role as teacher, not being able to find my classroom, my locker (teachers don’t have lockers, but never mind) my notes, my underwear ( most of my female colleagues have had that particular nightmare;-), suddenly having to teach Canadian Civics instead of Math ( wait – that was reality!)
My worst living nightmare was when I was taking anatomy and there was only one cat skeleton for perusal at the Bio library. I decided to be clever and wait till the last minute so that the bones would be fresh in my memory. When I got to the library the evening before the test they had closed early. I was screwed. Fortunately I was good at guessing…
The first law school class I taught was supposed to be Federal Procedure, which I knew pretty well. The dean of the school had misunderstood, though, and the day before the start of the semester, I discovered I was teaching Federal Jurisdiction, a totally different subject about which I knew nothing. That’s when I discovered the wonders of the teacher’s guide to the textbook.
This is a true story, not a dream!
I also got through college and law school by doing an entire semester’s work the night before the exam. I don’t understand why all of you find these dreams so awful.
I certainly learned Canadian Civics as we went along (and I even warned the 10th graders that we would be learning together). It actually turned out to be kind of fun, especially when you’re not trying to fake it.
They somehow didn’t have enough Math and CompSci classes that semester so to keep me at the school I was offered the Civics course. Fortunately I only had to do it once.
“I also got through college and law school by doing an entire semester’s work the night before the exam.”
😀 What’s that college humor meme, now? Something like, if you had 34 years to write a term paper, you’d still do it the night before it was due.
(In my case, I might end up asking for an extension…)
I had all my papers planned for execution right after I got the due dates for all my papers and exams. I was hyper organized because my brain breaks if I try to extract information from it for too long over one period and it was a mad dash to get relevant library books. I often had my papers written a month in advance for some classes while others I finished the paper right before but I had worked on it in bits & pieces previously.
I actually have a pleasant variation – in with being lost for a course, I find the library is really fancy and has bizarre ways of getting to different parts of it involving escalators and staircases.
Clearly the Harry Potter movies have made it into your dreams.
Or I’m trying to enjoy the extra fee I paid for 7 years for better facilities that weren’t built until 10 years after I was gone.
It’s crazy to hear you describe these academic anxiety dreams, as I have had them regularly for years. Mine usually entail sitting down for an exam and realizing that I have never been to the lectures, so I have no idea how to answer the questions (sometimes I’m naked in the dream too for whatever reason, which adds to the anxiety); a panicked inability to find the exam room also occurs commonly. Now that I’m a professor, similar dreams involving having to give a lecture and being unable to find the lecture hall as the clock reaches the lecture time also occur regularly as well. My wife has similar academic anxiety dreams, also involving some lack of preparation or inability to find the exam room. I would love to know what the psychological underpinnings of these dreams are.
Yes. In my case, it is mid semester and I discover that I had been scheduled to teach a class that I hadn’t shown up for.
Or, in one variation, I find out that I can’t remember if I HAD shown up to teach the class or not.
Not exactly academic, but I still dream of forgetting my gym clothes. I hated gym so much. My theory is that the President’s Council on Physical Fitness has contributed more to the unfitness of the US than anything else.
I’ve not had a classic academic dream of forgetting notes or missing a test. I do have a very defined dream house and dream city that I return to constantly.
I have four recurring themes.
Flying. ( like swimming through air…..love it )
Breathing under water. ( always on the lookout for teethy creatures, but still love it)
Being eaten alive by a giant spider. ( Hate it )
Dying in a nuclear blast. ( White and hot as hell…not as bad as the spider, though )
And then there’s a pirate ship that reminds me of home, for some odd reason. ( I guess that makes it five, but the ship keeps popping up in all sorts of dreams completely out of context )
I’m glad Freud isn’t my psychiatrist.
I love the flying dreams! I just ‘will’ it and up I go, flying around over the trees. Then I wake up, and. it. is. such. a. bummer.
Yes. I’ve been trying for years to figure out a way to make it work after I wake up.
Me too.
If I have the time I often try to snooze a bit longer just in case there’s a little flying left. It’s one of the best feelings I know of. 🙂
I have flying dreams, too. I was a long-jumper in my athletic days, so they take that form. I just keep going and going and going…
Flying is the most frequent dream I used to have. It is a very calming and empowering. I had them more when I used to swim more.
Rattlesnakes are the worst dreams I have ever had…but I no longer live in Arizona so those stopped.
It’s downright awesome when it happens.
“Awesome” Flying or rattlesnake bites?
*flap* *flap* *flap*…
You have to flap? I just hold out my arms straight out and soar. I use the angle of attack of my hands to control how high I go.
Mostly it’s fun except when that quiet little voice is noticing that there isn’t enough lift being generated to maintain flight.
Like Wile E. Coyote when he looks down…
Sometimes I do, but that is usually when I’m landing and trying to do it feet first.
Crash landings can be quite fun though…a lot of bouncing. 🙂
The spider dream sounds horrible. My spider dreams usually involve someone chasing me with one like big jerks & trying to put it on me & me freaking out, yelling & running.
I used to have a lot of nuclear war dreams as a kid involving nuclear blasts or surviving after a nuclear holocaust. Since the end of the cold war, those haven’t materialized so often but sometimes I have end of the world dreams.
It was pretty horrible, but I think I’m getting used to it.
On the plus side I’m not scared of them when awake…they’re tiny by comparison. 🙂
Yes, the swimming thru the air is a great feeling. I usually did breast stroke.
Also, I had lots of ping pong dreams when I was playing a lot of ping pong. No one ever missed the ball; it just went on and on.
“…not as bad as the spider, though…”
LOL!
Forgot to sub
Most of my academic anxiety dreams are set in high school, where I have to go back and take classes for some reason. Also, I can’t find my locker and/or get it open.
I’ve sometimes had the dream where I realize a month or two into a semester that I had another class that I hadn’t been going to.
(I used to have reoccurring dreams about being chased by the incoming tide at the beach where my family vacationed. Those haven’t happened recently but were a strong part of my childhood.)
Very similar here:
even though I have had my phD for years, it turns out that I still have high school credits to finish (or else all my academic achievements would be anulled), but I had forgotten all about it, the school year is already over and I have missed to go to all the relevant classes (where attendance is mandatory).
As a variation, I have to go to an exam, and I desperately try to find a mode of transportation to go there. All of the following problems occur:
– I forgot the exact time, but the exam has probably already started
– I don’t know exactly where to go
– I completely forgot to study
– I don’t even know the subject
– I am in an unknown city
– I’m at the train station but there is no path from where I am to the correct platform
– I find the station has been deserted for years.
Riddle me that, Freud. Oh, actually, it’s completely obvious.
Not too many possibilities with Freud. Mommie issues or Daddie issues.
I had a really stupid high school dream where I had been in high school for something like 15 years & I had to take some class to finally finish – then the whole standard academic anxiety dream commences.
I graduated from college in 1991 and received my Ph.D. in 2004. I still (maybe twice a month) have these academic anxiety dreams. Usually, it’s near the end of the semester and I’ve forgotten to go to a class the entire semester. I find myself in class but I am now completely behind with no hope of catching up and no hope of dropping the class. It surprises me that my dreams are still about undergraduate classes; I’ve never had a similar dream about anything in graduate school.
Identical dreams here.
About that… Grad school already was a nightmare while being awake, no need to dream anyhing 🙂
Yes, my dream sounds like yours, and many posters above me. Sometimes I’m driving and lost, sometimes there’s flood or a fire, but the common thread is these occurrences are making me late for an exam. I, too, often find that I haven’t been attending lectures, or I can’t remember the subject we’re studying, etc. Sometimes I’m teaching, sometimes a student. But it’s been 30 years of these dreams for me.
I wish I could have such a dream, but I never… :))
You do? I certainly don’t enjoy them.
When I was in college, I repeatedly had the classic dream of not being able to find the room where a final exam was being held.
Then it happened to me in real life. In my second year of grad school, I was at Oregon State’s marine lab in Newport, taking a statistics class on the main campus in Corvallis. I’d been skipping classes towards the end of the semester, so I hadn’t heard that the final exam would be in a different room. I got to the usual classroom at exam time and it was empty. In those pre-Internet days, I thought “Who would know where the exam is–the math department!” But I didn’t know where the math department was. So I rushed to the library, looked up the building that the math department was in, rushed across campus to where I thought the math building was, couldn’t find it, rushed back and forth checking several other buildings (they didn’t have names on the outside, I had to go inside each one to find if it was the right building), finally found the math department, they told me where the exam was, and I rushed across campus to that building. I arrived 45 minutes late for a two-hour exam.
And I’ve never had the can’t-find-the-exam dream again. So the lesson is clear, just let it happen to you and you won’t dream about it again (although be careful with firetruck-chasing-you-off-a-cliff dream).
That’s quite the tale!
I use to have the dream of missing an exam or having an exam and hadn’t attended that class. I did an awake meditation, going back into the dream and questioning people and things in the dream. When I asked the professor in the dream what it mean’t, I got the answer that I was missing the classroom of life. That I was not getting the lessons of life. When I realized that and thought more on it, the dreams stopped.
Jerry, I’ve had that dream about once a month for decades. Mine sometimes take place in high school, sometimes at University. The other recurring one I have along these lines is that I need to go back to grad school and get my Ph.D. all over again.
What’s more, for about 10 years, I have had “work on the evolution of dreaming” on my to-do list, but it has never made it anywhere near the top of this rather long list.
I have two recurring dreams which have plagued me for about twenty-five years or so. The first is what I call a “Bad House” dream. I am in a familiar location – my current or a former dwelling – but there are rooms that don’t belong, hidden passages and doors leading to illogical places, and people who don’t belong (such as dead relatives or old antagonists). One variant of this has me discovering that my wife isn’t dead after all, but has been engaged in some secret endeavor and I am trying to persuade her to return.
The second is that I have returned to one of two former jobs, one of which I loved but there isn’t any work for me to do there and the other of which I absolutely hated.
Sometimes these have been so intense that I wake up either wondering why I’m in my own bed or with the feeling that I’m going to be late for work.
Oh, the “bad house” dream! I’ve had it for the past few decades. I always find myself responsible for an enormous and falling apart old mansion, sometimes castle-like, with enormous complicated passageways to rooms where the roof is partially collapsed. Etc.
This has nothing to do with the fact that we own an old 1915 duplex that demands constant repairs.
I’ve had this one too. I discover new rooms, fully furnished, but they’re in poor repair: holes in the walls and floors, and very dirty.
Usually creepy, they also feature odd “lighting”: dark corners, lights that suddenly go out. Strange.
I have dreams like this but they are good dreams. Like I find whole new rooms in my house that are really fancy but I didn’t know that they were there.
The bad house dream I had a lot as a kid. We lived in an old house and the lady died in it when she was old. I used to dream of these girls who would tell me that they had to show me where they were buried because they were murdered. They would take me to the side of my house & tell me that they were buried there.
You can imagine how anxious a kid I was in that house!
I also have two version of those recurring dreams. The first version is almost exactly like the one that Jerry described: Running through my high school trying to find the exam room.
The other version is at an exam itself. Standing at a board in order to solve a task but being unable to speak or move.
Well, this was better than a dream:
I lived in New York during 1982-1985, and one year we had this craze of courses being taught everywhere about everything–I thought this was a fantastic idea. You just went to the course at the right time and right address, with the money, and that’s it. So I went to the Stuyvesant High School for a course on fiction writing, looked up the floor and class room, and sat down with high expectations. Slowly the room filled up with strange women wearing business suits and pearls, and men wearing sporty suits. So I went outside, and asked one of the attendants about this course. He started laughing, “this is the course about ‘marrying rich,’ your course is one floor below.”
That made my day. 🙂
Ha ha! A course about marrying rich – that’s hilarious!
Besides academic anxiety dreams, another recurring dream I have is about tornadoes. I grew up in Iowa, and I have seen several of them so naturally they also follow me into my dreams.
The theme is that they (there are always several) are rampaging along the horizon, and they seem to be looking for me. Many years ago one of them approached me and said something, but that was when I woke up with a violent start. I never knew what the tornado said.
I, too, have been chased by these clever vortices since I was a kid. It’s always the same; I’m standing alone on a vast open plain with low, rounded hills on the horizon. The storm approaches directly for me, with the funnel dropping out of the wall cloud like a demented elephant’s trunk, almost Wizard of Oz-ish. I turn to run but of course I’m impeded by the fly-paper stickiness of the ground. The roar of the approaching storm turns into voices which I seem to understand (at least in dreamscape logic)is imparting some sort of warning to me. I am vacuumed into the vortex which snaps me awake. The dreaming mind is truly an alien landscape.
Some researchers regard dreams as being so strange because our cognition is decoupled from our sensory processing. They go on to delineate that dreaming is simply cognition practice using ‘visual props’ from our waking life to keep those synapses from getting rusty while we get our beauty sleep.
Surprisingly we don’t create new faces that people our dreams; the only faces we see are ones we know from real life which however can be disguised. Recently I had a dream where the person dressed and acted like my mother, but had the face of a past boyfriend.
Lucid dreaming is intriguing which I have been doing since earliest memories. I have encountered two definitions:
1) the dream is so real that it can take up to a half hour to realise that it was just a dream and that none of the events happened.
2) the dreamer directs the dream, that is, the dreamer is conscious that she is dreaming.
I do more of 1) than 2).
I mention lucid dreaming down yonder. They are weird b/c they are so mundane.
My anxiety dreams take two forms: one is that I’m in a play and on onstage but have never studied my lines. The other is that it’s the opening day of school where I’ve just been hired to teach, and I don’t know what classes I’m supposed to teach or what room I’ve been assigned to. Is that a sign that I’ve had to “wing it” through life?
Aren’t we all winging it through life?
I have similar dreams all the time, in those dreams I typically find myself being completely surprised by an exam with no time left to prepare for it properly, and the exam is just beginning!
BTW, speaking of dreams, I had a strange dream tonight during which I realized that what I was dreaming about was impossible, and therefore had to be just a dream! Soon after I realized this (inside the dream), I woke up. Unfortunately I can’t remember for the life of me what the dream was about right now.
In addition to the late/can’t find the exam dream (which I’ve had since college), ever since I started teaching I’ve had the dream another reader mentioned about realizing I’d completely forgotten about one of my courses for most of a semester. The dream then unfolds with me looking vainly for the room where that class meets, without any notes or syllabus.
A variation on those dreams I’ve also had for years has been related to sports: I played soccer in high school and college, and my dream usually has me frantically searching for the bus that will take me to the game, or sitting in the locker room unable to tie my shoes or something.
I’m a nervous flier, and I’ve also had many dreams over the years where I find myself at the controls of some kind of airplane. The funniest one (in retrospect) was one where I looked out the window, in panic, and instead of engines the wings were being supported by ducks. But I do also occasionally have those pleasant dreams where I, personally, can levitate or fly–do many others have those?
Wings being supported by ducks made LOL.
Oh, yes, I used to have nightmares in May approx about missing or not studying for exams,finals. Now, at 86, they have dimmed…vanished. About time, eh? It may just demonstrate conscience, fear of failure….are ALL dreams, maybe, due to stress, not always a bad thing.
Xkcd also reports these dreams!
http://xkcd.com/557/
I suffered from them for at least 10 years after grad school. Less so now, but still occasionally.
Some small group of neurons is still there shouting “have you studied for the test”, or “have you finished your assignment” and every now and then they get a scrub through during REM. I presume that without new stimulation this will eventually reduce their impact, but similar behaviours, deadlines etc probably reinforce them and keep them firing, hence the re-occurrence.
Academic anxiety dreams? Oh my yes, for decades I have had the same dream over and over (but only three or four times per year). I show up for class completely unaware that there is an exam scheduled for that day. Not only that, when I sit down to take it I realize that I hadn’t been to class all semester (or sometimes that I hadn’t been to most of the classes). I always wake up feeling anxious and disturbed and if the dream happens just before I get up for the day the feeling persists into the day.
I hates those dreamsiz.
When I was in college, I frequently had the dream others have mentioned: it’s time for finals, and I suddenly remember that I was supposed to be taking a course [in the dream, I always attended the class once and then forgot about it. “Oh, $#!+! I was supposed to be taking American Literature every Tuesday morning!”] It’s been over 30 years since I was in college, and I still have this dream about once a year. Another one I occasionally have is that I hear from my old High School that I was one credit short of what I needed for graduation and have to go back and take one course. I’m in my 50s and sitting in a class next to teenagers.
I now manage a movie theater and occasionally have dreams where I go to the booth to start the movie and find that the projector has been disassembled, or is pointing in the wrong direction, or the movie has not been loaded and I can’t find it.
As for how long dreams last, I once had a dream that my alarm clock was going off, but I couldn’t find it. I spent several minutes looking all over for it. When I finally woke up for real, I saw that my alarm clock had been going off for 5 minutes. So I think that this dream, at least, was in real time.
I had weird dreams, night after night. Men with guns coming to kill me. I ran from room to room in a long corridor trying to lock the door behind me. Each time the lock failed and I had to run to the next room, where the lock again failed, until I woke up. Got to the point that I could not watch any TV programme or film with a gun in it. Eventually grew out if it but so real and scary it was never forgotten. Sorry not academic but it was all and still is, so vivid. Was very interested in your post. It made absolute sense to me.
From what I understand these types of dreams are common. I routinely have a standard version of the dream and a non-standard one:
1. End of quarter or term, and I realize I have an exam for a class I never attended. My dream self always thinks: “Why didn’t I just drop this class?” or “Why am I bothering to take the exam?”
2. I’m in high school, between class periods, and I can’t remember my locker combination.
It’s hard to say for certain, but I rarely if ever have reoccurring dreams. Reoccurring elements, certainly. Dream Philadelphia shows up as a setting every now and then, with less frequent appearances of Dream Toronto, Dream New York and Dream Baltimore. And I seem to be unable to speak often enough in my dreams that I even recognize it while dreaming. Realizing it doesn’t wake me up, but it also doesn’t seem to have any effect other than momentary recognition.
And then there was the time I dreamed that I was changing L. Ron Hubbard’s fuses, which weren’t normal fuses and were in the ceiling rather than the breaker box while he gave me a Scientology run down.
That’s exactly the dream I have whenever I’m anxious, and I have for decades.
Do I dream about not making it through grad school, not being able to write my thesis, failing my Ph.D. defense, or my tenure decision? Never. Apparently undergraduate exams were the most traumatically-anxious events in my life.
And, I’ve spoken to so many people who have that dream. I try to tell my own students at the beginning of classes not to have exam anxiety, but I fear it isn’t working.
You might as well prepare them for the inevitable: all this will haunt them like Freddie Kruger! 😉
Another weird sort of dream that I am sure everyone has is what I think are called ‘lucid dreams’. This is where your dream is an excellent replica of your life right now, and you fully believe that you are experiencing it ‘live’. I’ve had several of these, and if I wake up during it it is extremely confusing! What am I doing in bed? Where is everybody?
Are you dreaming this now?
When I was in college, I dreamed that I got a phone call saying that my father had died. When I woke up, I thought for several seconds that it had really happened the night before; then I realized that it must have been a dream [there were parts of the “memory” that were unrealistic].
Interesting point about holes in the memory – something not quite right. I’ve never experienced lucid dreaming but have read that it is easy to forget if you are awake or dreaming. It’s recommended to look at things you know are real: if each hand has four fingers and a thumb you might be awake. If you have crab claws you’re dreaming.
Once in a while I realize that I’m dreaming. A while ago I dreamed I was in my office and a dog walked past my open door. Then a whole parade of them began trotting by. I thought “How did all these dogs get into the building? It doesn’t make any sense.” I then realized that it must be a dream.
Funny. I think Jerry might say you were dreaming of hell.
Well, I like dogs, so I guess that makes me Satan.
Glitch in the Matrix!
I often realize I’m dreaming when I find myself in the company of dead friends and relatives. And my reaction is usually along the lines of “Isn’t that nice?”
What about “programmed” dreaming (I’m not sure if there is an appropriate technical term) – what I mean is that a dream which seems to be based on what I was reading, watching or thinking about as or just before I fell asleep. I have tried deliberately thinking of something to see if I can influence what I dream about, and sometimes it seems to work.
Other than flying, few have mentioned good dreams.
Also no one has mentioned sex dreams. I still have those now and then; I may be getting old, but not dead yet.
rarely have good dreams. I once dreamed I was a James Bond type hero and that was indeed a lot of fun.
as for sex dreams, those are always odd. Recently dreamed of having sex with Patrick Stewart. It was strangely matter of fact.
Most of my dreams the first ten years after I graduated were academic anxiety dreams. They’ve subsided in the last fifteen years. The last one was a very long time ago.
In these dreams, I was often faced with a final in a class I had never attended. I was completely unfamiliar with the material that I was to master.
I thought I was the only one who had those dreams (and I am not even an academic) – and I attributed them to my poor performance in grade 12 exams (any Indian student will vouch why those exams are a BIG deal).
Normally, my dream always involves an exam for a non-technical descriptive subject like business management or English language, where I have to memorise rather than calculate. And the exam is only couple of days away, and I realise I haven’t prepared for the exam and cannot recollect a single answer. The dream is always stressful and scary.
I have a variant on that dream. After the course has finished, in the summer or autumn, I suddenly realise that I have just failed to do an essential piece of coursework, however no-one has noticed, yet. The fear is that someone will notice, and I’ll have my degree taken away. I consider various devious plans to smuggle the work into the university, so that it looks like it was submitted at the right time.
Yes, but since I became a professor, I have dreams that I should be teaching but cannot find my classroom. It is late and the students are waiting, I’m afraid they will leave before I can find them. I still have some exam dreams, but more often they are teaching dreams now… Not sure what is worse 🙂
I was plagued by the final exam dream (always Calculus for me) from high school well into my tenure track position. Interestingly, once I had my first child, the dream changed from calculus to an anxiety dream about going into labor. In the dream, I don’t know I am pregnant until labor begins. Then the anxiety hits – I am panicked about not knowing how to care for a baby, and not having a car seat, diapers, baby clothes etc. I continue to have the “baby dream”, but no longer have the “calculus final dream”. I find it interesting that my weekly anxiety dreams are a reflexion of my real-life priorities.
They all seem to be dreams of forgetting to prepare for something important whether it’s an exam, a move, a course or a baby. It must speak to our left brain trying to categorize things and the anxiety over missing something.
Oh, yeah, having kids brings on a whole new class of things to panic about!!
I haven’t taught for over 10 years and still occasionally dream that I’m not prepared for class, or that I have to give a final exam I haven’t written.
I also have student dreams, in which I have registered for a class, never went, and forgot to drop it and now it’s time for the final exam! Too late! What to do?
Or I’ve been going to class but forgot to sign off on my financial aid and am no longer enrolled but I’ve been doing really well and I want to finish out the semester. Should I keep going and pretend I belong there?
I’m no believer in woo of any kind but have had the oddest dream several times over the last few years. I am being chased by satan and he looks exactly like the stereotype. And I am scared stiff. I have no where to flee so I run as hard as I can and plunge off a cliff. Inches before I hit the ground I do a big swan dive and fly right back up and laugh at the whole thing. Weird. But if woo comes in degrees I would assign Freud an eighty percent.
Apparently, flying & falling dreams are common & they’re associated with some neurological thing. People almost never land in their flying/falling dreams!
The wives tale says that if you land and die then you die in real life!
That’s funny that you fly up and laugh at it.
The whole thing is weird. It’s been a great thread. Lot’s of goofiness.
Even in South Africa we have dreams like that! I am a medical doctor and a frequent dream of mine is that I am to write my final exams the next day otherwise I would not be allowed to practice further as a medical doctor, although I wrote those exams 32 years ago! Also a frequent dream, and I’m sure many people have them, is that I’m flying by just moving my arms up and down. What an exciting dream!
Yessiree.
Mine involve some literature course for which I haven’t been attending all semester due to trying to keep up with other courses and the final is quickly approaching with me scrambling to make up for all the reading I hadn’t done.
That was reality for me in lit courses!
My own (post-retirement) academic nightmare is finding myself recalled to duty at no notice to give again the last series of lectures that I gave (which were Honours Introductory Chemistry to UNT’s talented and gifted early admissions class and a few other brave students.) In reality these were much enjoyed on both sides of the lectern, but in the dream I have lost my notes, don’t know what the main points are that I’m trying to make, forget fundamental facts, and muddle through while the class walks out, one after the other.
I’m surprised that your own dreams, and those of commentators here, all reflect student anxiety. I thought instructors also were supposed to be anxious, to get the juices flowing.
Yeah, I was just going to point out that I haven’t had a dream where I was a student for many decades, but I’m always having dreams where I haven’t adequately prepared to teach a class or give an exam. I just thought it was a natural progression.
I have both and I am currently neither!
Me, too
I’m decades out of University but still occasionally have the dream where I forgot to attend a class the entire semester.
I have spoken to waiters who have had a similar dream. They get to the end of their shift and look over at a table full of hungry diners that they forgot to serve.
I have had recurring dreams with the no trousers, wandering the halls unable to find the exam hall/classroom kind but this falls under the ‘other’ recurring variety:
I’ve had a lot of recurring dreams over the years, most of them take place within the same fictional city, parts of which I know very well now.
I think lots of people have toilet anxiety dreams; one of my most vivid in this city is of this type, it’s set in an underground toilet that is accessed via a spiral ramp, everything is grungy and green hued. The room is a rotunda, there are no toilet cubicles and all the toilets are hung high up on the wall so you have to clamber to reach them. In the centre of the room is a massive round communal basin with multiple taps. Ugh, it’s awful!
This fictional city often has ramps in my recurring dream sections…don’t know why…
Another of my recurring dreams is an abandoned house in the sea.
hmmm, I suppose I can say it’s mildly reassuring that other people have toilet anxiety dreams.
Oh yeah, I have those weird toilet dreams too. You really have to use the washroom but you go to some horrible grungy place that is dirty and something is always wrong with the toilets – they are in weird places or whatever. Usually, I just have to really go to the washroom in real life & I wake up. It’s like my body is getting the signals that it needs to go to the bathroom but my sleeping brain doesn’t know how to interpret them.
Phew, knew it wasn’t just me…!
I still have these kinds of dreams. I think I was traumatized in prep school and university, where the washrooms were pretty filthy.
And also one where I’ve a very large overdue book and I’m too terrified of the massive sum I’ve incurred to ever take it back to the university library- I think this one makes me feel the worst actually…!
*chuckle* been there in reality. I have purchased a few.
I had that happen to me as a student and for real. I gave back the books but didn’t pay the fine so I have a fear they will come get me now. They didn’t have computerized records then though.
Lucid dreams are dreams where you know you are dreaming while you are dreaming. There is an investigator at Stanford studying this. Stephen Laberge.
Also, How about this-it goes beyond simple anxiety and into the realm of metaphorical meaning. I was in graduate school at the time and had the following dream- a tortoise wearing a bonnet of forget-me-nots was pulling a train of loaded cars along a yellow railroad track, with considerable sense of hurry and frustration. And dropping off parts of the load along the way.
When I woke I realized it was a metaphorical description of my state of mind- trying to absorb a lot of new information and trying to store it in appropriate places before I forgot it.It got me all interested in metaphor and all sorts of stuff
My academic dream is usually about being an assistant or substitute teacher and arriving late, unprepared, improperly dressed, and unable to reach the classroom even though I know where it is. The building is a derelict hodgepodge and I’m ultimately sidetracked by a former professor (not always the same one) who is alone in a room, in a losing struggle with some kind of setback, and tells me to forget the class because it’s not worth bothering with and there are other things I’m supposed to be doing instead.
I used to have a recurring nightmare about having to care for a small injured or sick animal while travelling under dangerous conditions. The animal kept shrinking until it could no longer survive, the situation became chaotic and full of people, and I woke up.
I also have small animal dreams – my animals keep metamorphosing (not that I find this remarkable in the dream), but I’m similarly trying (and failing) to keep them with me and keep them alive. Now that I have cats, it’s always my own cats that feature, though they might turn into tortoises, mice or fish along the way.
Since I stopped teaching, my brain also likes to torture me with dreams of going to the first lecture of a course I have to teach with nothing prepared whatsoever, and often only with the vaguest idea of what the subject is.
I’d forgotten the pet dreams. Trying to herd my various dogs and cats ( some recognized, some not) through floods, horrible buildings, woods, fires, whatever…
I still have school anxiety dreams. I had a great one at the end of my first quarter at UC, when I dreamed that I had a Japanese language final exam, but I hadn’t been to class all quarter. This was fun, because I wasn’t even taking Japanese. Nowadays when I have them, I am my current age, but back in the dorms for some reason. (I had a friend who had been in the Navy in the late 50s, and would dream he was back on shipboard, but as a 55 year old man.)
I also have work anxiety dreams — forgot my laptop, not dressed appropriately, etc. Recently, school and work anxiety merged when I dreamed that I had an Algebra exam the next day, and hadn’t taken Algebra in 30 years. In the dream I thought I could probably get by. The problem was that I also had a customer meeting the next day, and I wasn’t sure if there was a scheduling conflict.
After our most recent move, I now have moving anxiety dreams, which involve me having to pack something simple, like a suitcase, but the number of items I have to find and pack keeps growing.
for a couple of decades now i’ve been following archetypal psychology, which grew out of jungianism but without jung’s romantic supernaturalism and woo (synchronicity, spiritualism, the self as a god-like organizing principle seeking “wholeness”, etc., etc.)
the dreams do seem to be lively metaphorical reflections/expressions of our current emotional states and intellectual activity (which often have roots in our past experiences) and are not just “screen savers” as pinker postulates. there’s nothing supernatural or “spooky” about them. they’re not connecting you to the great beyond or another dimension. but the little dramas they put on for us each night do contain a lot of information about our own emotional life. sometimes people even find in their dreams solutions to intellectual problems they’ve been working on during their waking hours.
a lot of high-achievers have anxiety dreams. anxiety is a powerful motivator, for good or for ill. the question is what’s at the root of the anxiety and why does one feel constantly threatened or inadequate. is one applying unrealistically high standards and expectations of behavior/performance? do you see the world as fundamentally hostile to you (and are you hostile towards it)? do those feelings of anxiety and threat interfere with other aspects of the personality, such as interpersonal relationships? again, anxiety is not negative in itself. it leads to great achievements.
it would be interesting to explore that figure with the liberace-hair who is not only obsessively organized but is more interested in dominating others rather than in cooperating. in what way is that an aspect of your own personality? or do you consider him to be essentially different from you? is that how you view the world, as a zero-sum game? generally speaking all figures in the dream can be read as aspects of our own personality and emotional patterns. often we’re unaware of them, which is why people talk of the unconscious.
those are the kinds of reflections archetypal dream analysis leads to. over the years i’ve found dream work to be quite enlightening.
as neuroscience continues to reveal how much of our life is played out outside our conscious awareness, it will be interesting to see if a more scientific study of dream content will show that dreams are one way of accessing some of that pre-conscious processing.
Being late for an examination and being late for a swim competition dreams. I have had them my whole life. I do not think they ever go completely away.
Well, eventually they all do! 😉
Clearly a lot of people have similar dreams. I have them too, with a variation in which I’m late for a plane flight or boat trip, and have a lot of unpacked stuff.
I still have those dreams and I’ve been out of school for almost 20 years. Either I can’t find the room, I took a class bit didn’t go to any of the lectures and now is the day of the final exam and I try to figure out what to do and try to find notes. The classes seem to either be some sort of history class or a French class for some reason. I get these dreams whenever I’m stressed.
I also get elevator dreams when stressed. The elevator turns upside down, the floor opens etc. I get them so often that in the dream I either say that it is weird I’m in this situation since I always dreamed about it or I say that it is another elevator issue and why am I plagued with elevator issues?
My old bf once got stuck in an elevator for close to an hour in an office building in downtown Toronto. The phone in the elevator was “busy”. I think he was between the ground and 2nd floors and could hear the security guard down in the lobby. He yelled Excuse me, I’m stuck in the elevator. The guard yelled back for him to “keep it down”. They finally got the Otis guy to come and get him out…
The same happened at an elevator where I worked. One guy got stuck in it and his buddy wondered where he was so he yelled down the elevator shift and he answered.
I never took the elevator there & I could do that because it was just a couple floors not a high rise.
I had a paper route when I was a kid, and one of my stops was a nine-story apartment building. One morning, I was in the elevator and the doors wouldn’t open. The car moved, but I couldn’t get out. Finally, a tenant called the fire department and I got pulled out through the roof hatch. That wasn’t so bad (except for being late with the rest of my deliveries and for school), but the paper decided to humiliate me by running an item about it the next day.
I never had an elevator dream. Though as a graduate student the power once went down in our building for two hours and trapped three girls in the elevator late at night. If I am certain of one thing, it is this: all three have had numerous dreams of elevators and most of them not good.
My AA dream is that I have a looming exam and have skipped all the classes.
Probably speaks to the time when, newly married and wife supported, I spent much more time in third year playing bridge than attending classes.
Bridge was OK: university pairs champ; academic results: failed two out of five courses; partner failed year; damaged future prospects. Serious guilt.
This is only para-academic, but for many years I’ve dreamed on and off that the end of the academic year came and I had to move out of my freshman dorm room. For some reason, I wasn’t able to move my stuff out and kept trying to do so while the other rooms emptied until no other students were left and the school staff started moving through to clean things up.
This is probably easily interpreted in theological terms. ;-}
Nick Rivers’ anxiety dream.
I don’t have anxxiety-provoking dreams, maybe because there’s enough anxiety in my life. I remember one dream in which I was a kangaroo, bounding up and down stairs and through the lobby at Radio City Music Hall. Exhilarating!
I have dreams similar to these on a regular basis, and I graduated from university 34 years ago! Some have been so common (and repetitive)that I have to remind myself that I remember dreams and not true events!
Yes, I have them, very similar formula.
I’ve heard psychiatrists interviewed on NPR (US public radio) and they all said that more or less every person with a college degree has this dream at some time or at various times.
I was a Theatre major in college, so I had two variations on this dream.
The first was related to non-theatre classes, and would involve me showing up for the final exam having somehow missed every class of the semester, and therefore being completely unprepared.
The second was performance related. It would be opening night for a play, and I would be about to go on stage, but I couldn’t remember any of my lines! Sometimes I wasn’t even supposed to be in the play, but one of the cast members would get sick or injured, and I would have to take their place.
I haven’t performed in a play in about six years, and I still get this dream regularly.
My other anxiety dream involves having my teeth fall out. I’m told that this is a fairly common dream for people to have, but it doesn’t make it any less terrifying.
The weirdest dream I’ve had that I remember involved Oliver Kahn, (the German goalkeeper some years ago).
It started like a TV cartoon show or something, with the words “Oliver Kahn in Daracula-Kahn!”, appearing in bold white letters on a red background. The story opened with some young lass working behind the counter in a bakery. Oliver Kahn walks in, and she is awe struck, and gasps “Oh, Oliver!”. Kahn says to her “Ach, du süsses Mädel” and takes her gallantly in his arms.
In his embrace she looks down and notices that he is wearing his football boots, and — horror — they have small Dracula fangs emerging from the front of them. She freezes in horror.
End of dream. WTF???
That is so hilarious. I’m laughing with tears at that dream. Dracula Kahn alone is funny!
In the real world, a few years ago I had to take part in some stupid touchy feely HR team thing. The HR person running the meeting asked us to write down what we feared (about the exercise but she didn’t say that part) so I wrote DRACULA then nudged the guy beside me and said, “look what I wrote” and we started laughing.
That poor woman. She would have collected those cards with legitimate things like “wasting time” or “not being heard” and she sees DRACULA.
Now anything about Dracula makes me laugh.
LOL
That’s good — atheists usually only fear zombies these days, so it’s good to see Dracula making a return!
Miine are about air flights. I am late, I am going to miss the plane, I leave my luggage behind, I forget the time of the flight, etc. etc. etc.
Very similar academic anxiety dream though much less frequently (twice a year would be my guess) and I have read that it is common.
Current theory on dreams is that they are the brain sorting out that days events into long-term vs. short term memory and creating connections between them and other events.
I’m a tenured professor who’s been teaching for 15 years and I frequently have dreams about:
1) Missing an exam, or having to take an exam for a course that I forgot to attend.
2) Not being able to find a classroom for a class that I’m either taking or teaching.
3) Having to give a conference talk (either within minutes/hours or the next day) without having prepared the talk, usually already having arrived at the conference venue.
4) Discovering that the university where I did my BA made a mistake in letting me graduate because I was one course short. So my undergraduate and graduate degrees as well as my current job and tenure are all revoked and I have to go back and finish my BA.
5) Discovering that I will lose my job on June 30 (always June 30!) because the university has decided a) to not renew my contract or b) to fire me (for some unspecified reason).
#4 sounds like the premise for a sitcom
1) Missing an exam, or having to take an exam for a course that I forgot to attend.
2) Not being able to find a classroom for a class that I’m either taking or teaching.
Those cover mine.
I’ve had these dreams on and off for about twenty years. I’m at a law school exam final and I don’t have the faintest idea what the answers are. I’m desperately watching the time tick away and finally I’m the only one left in the lecture hall with my test with nothing written in the bluebook. Moreover, I’m usually dressed only in my underwear. I often thought that these dreams arose from the guilt of having wasted time and money on a degree I never used. However, since I took early retirement as a union carpenter/cabinetmaker last December I’m having dreams that I am at work in violation of my retirement agreement in which I cannot work as a carpenter and I’m under extreme anxiety I will be discovered. Who knows.
The number of comments will surpass all records.
My strangest ‘no pants’ dream came the night before my admissions interview to the medical school I attended. In the dream, my buddies and I were lost trying to find the site for the interviews. Of course, I was sans pants and could not find any to save my soul. We drove around and turned down a street where a fire hydrant was gushing into the street. later we had to retrace our route but now the street had flooded to the size of a bay with 4 foot swells. We found a boat and started to cross – Then it got surreal 😉
Our boat was attacked by a 25+ foot Great White Shark which I had to dispatch with a boat hook. We made it across but still hadn’t found the interview site when I awoke.
I stuck the real interview the next day, I feel in large part, because talking to a full professor in an interview was nothing compared to defeating Jaws in his native element. FYI, I did find pants for the actual interview.
You know it’s going to be good, when it starts out, “My strangest ‘no pants’ dream”. 😀
Glad you found pants for the actual interview and didn’t have a shark biting your backside;-)
I have had interviews where it felt how I imagine that would feel 😉
:-))
Jerry,
Thank you for finally giving a name to something that I’ve been afflicted with at least once a month since I graduated from university over 27 years ago. Apart from a couple of years where I was doing professional qualifications I have pretty much been out of education for over a quarter of a century. My academic anxiety dream always revolves around the days before my finals and it’s always the one where I need to revise a couple more texts but I can never find the books and then I my next problem is that I can’t find my digs and I end up wandering the streets as time counts down until the my finals begin. The anxiety slowly escalates and I increasingly get the feeling that I’ve walking through syrup that is slowly solidifying. I will then wake up in a cold sweat.
Better get used to them for the rest of my life then!!
Regards
Martin
My recurring dream goes like this. I’m out driving in my car. I’m approaching a busy junction, a crossroads with traffic lights which, inevitably, turn red. I ease my foot onto the break peddle; you guessed it, nothing happens! The hand brake doesn’t work and I’m on a downward slope so my speed remains constant. Car ambles Right Through that busy junction while other motorists swerve to avoid it. There nothing I can do about it as I brace for the collision that never comes. In all the years I’ve had the dream it always ends the same way, sailing out the other side of the junction unscathed. Scares me half to death.
I’ve had dreams of rolling my car & such. Those are really unpleasant dreams. Usually after the crash, I wake up.
Judging from the number of comments, this is a common dream. I’m 68 and still have the dream where I haven’t been to any of the classes and can’t find the exam room.
Back in college I had recurring dream that I had forgotten that I had registered for a class. And because I forgot that I registered, of course I never attended and was going to fail the class. Was very disturbing. The dream’s recurrence tailed off after college graduation.
In my flying dreams, I have trouble maintaining altitude, so sometimes hit treetops or even scrape the ground. But when I get good elevation its very fun!
For about 25 years, I have had a recurring dream about taking an exam that I am not prepared for. And it is clear to me where this comes from – when I was 18 I did have to take a key exam which I wasn’t prepared for because my teacher had taught the wrong syllabus for nearly 2 years. The upshot was that my university and career plans were left in tatters.
But I have another recurring dream and I have no idea why. In the origanl dream, I was picked to play rugby for England. I know that it is a big mistake, I am not good enough and I will look like a fool. The team runs out onto the pitch at Twickenham in front of 80,000 people, the National Anthem starts and I wake up in a slight panic.
I have had different versions of the dream including one where I have made an Olympic swimming final and wake up just as we take to the starting blocks.
They are very weird because I really don’t know where they are coming from.
I was in University (on and off) from 1971-1984 and finished my PhD in 1987 (geology). Thirty years later I still have academic anxiety dreams whenever I am under major stress. They usually involve me forgetting to attend a math class that I need to graduate, and being faced with a final exam. In my case, this “academic PTSD” seems to be triggered by many of life’s stresses. That said, I do enjoy the feeling I have when I awaken to realize that it all worked out just fine.
Not an academic and 40+ years out of school, but I too sometimes dream of walking into a final exam without having attended a single class. I also have levitation dreams which are my favorites.
I wonder what dreams Ug the caveman had in common with his mates.
I have a recurrent dream (rarely, unfortunately) where I have a “magic skateboard” thingie that I can sit on and that levitates just above the ground, and which I can control by mental will. I scoot around effortlessly on it. Great fun.
But my wife says my skateboard is baby stuff compared with her ability to fly like an airplane by mental will in her dreams. 🙂
Question for the people who dreamed of them flying: do you have to have your arms out to fly?
In the levitation dreams I mentioned elsewhere, I could float, but I could only move around by pushing off from objects like buildings, trees and such. So, no.
Ah, so your flying skates were figure skates, not hockey skates 🙂
Several years since I had a flying dream. Often I swam- the Australian crawl. I used to swim competitively. And some times I just willed myself up up and away. Remember swooping up and down in my high school gym and also outside just trying to see how high I could go.
Don’t renember ever having a flying dream. Wonder if I coukd will myself to it – maybe watch Superman the night before?
Arms used only for fun and style points, per my wife. 🙂
I sometimes have a ‘running’ dream that develops in one of two ways. Either my feet start to get tangled up with each other (bad); OR, I jump over a puddle and find I can keep going, floating in the air, for many many yards before I touch down. It feels really pleasant.
Having relied on public transportation for most of my life (though not the past 5 years), I frequently dream of getting on the wrong train or bus, and winding up in Long Island (Horrors!) Or I get to Battery Park City and realize I was supposed to go to Capitol Hill
Have you seen Being John Malkovitch, with the New Jersey Turnpike shtick??
Nope, but oddly I never have dreams of getting lost while driving though I have often done so!
I used to have that variety of dream but haven’t since my 50s 20 years ago. I think they reflected insecurity & stress about other academic tasks or activities.
I have PTSD from combat in Iraq. I used to have a recurring strange experience when I was just waking up, or about to fall asleep.
I’d see countless images flash before my eyes so fast that I couldn’t make them out, but I felt that they were very violent images, like someone about to strike me. One image would rush towards me, but right before the image would ‘hit’ me, it was instantly replaced by the next rushing towards me, and the next, and the next, and so on. It felt like hundreds or thousands per second. This never happened when I was fully conscious or fully asleep. As an aside, my dreams were were extremely graphic and violent but I won’t describe those.
I talked to my neurologist about them and he thought they were similar to flashbacks, but not to worry about them since they occurred when I was partially awake/asleep and not fully conscious.
This happened almost daily. I wont call them dreams because they would happen when I’m in between sleep and wakefulness.
I’m in the 16th month of 17 months of neurotherapy to treat my PTSD. As the therapy progressed, the images slowed down a bit, these episodes came less often and I could no longer ‘see’ what the images were. Every now and then I still get this sensation but the images are now just a collection of geometric lines and shapes.
A few months ago, I saw a series on the history of art. One of the episodes tracked painting from modern back to pre-historic cave art. The host was trying to interpret a centuries old series of rock paintings in Africa and tracked down the descendants of the tribe that painted them. The images in question were a surreal mix of animal/man hybrids and geometric shapes. The host talked to a neurologist at some university who was able to produce these same geometric images at will in test subjects by stimulating the brain with low strength magnetic fields and/or medication. He produced a computer graphic simulation of the images.
I jumped up off my couch – the simulation showed geometric shapes that were virtually identical to what I see in these strange episodes. The neurologists theory is that these images are actually the result of how the visual center of our brains is wired. That these are what we get when our visual cortex processes our thoughts instead of the normal visual stimulus.
I really wish I could remember the name of that series; I’d love to watch that episode again.
You’d like Oliver Sacks book “Hallucination.” There are many non-psychotic causes of hallucinations.
These images between waking and sleeping are generally referred to as hypnagogic imagery.And seem to be reflective of the degree of energy in the nervous/physical system. They can be quite fantastic. When I was making quilts the most amazing images would arise in those episodes. I never could suite get a hold of them -too bad. They change in quality as you slide further in to sleep and can be deliberately controlled-or played with-to some degree if you can maintain awareness thru the process. Then you can slide into a lucid dream. I find them kind of interesting in terms of understanding the metaphorical content of dreams and how to understand what is going on with oneself.
. There is a book-kind of dry but informational-by Mevromatis(?). It is way out of print and not even available thru 2nd hand outlets. I finally dug up a copy thru the university system
“These images between waking and sleeping are generally referred to as hypnagogic imagery.And seem to be reflective of the degree of energy in the nervous/physical system. They can be quite fantastic.”
They can also be terrifying!
I sometimes get those before I’m falling asleep. I always took it that they were just RAM dumps from my brain. I recall I see a lot of faces in the images but I rarely remember them if I’m woken up. I do recall that sometimes they are rather scary as well.
I had dreams like this on occasion in my 20s, 30s, and 40s, but rarely, if ever, in my 50s.
“Integral Dreaming” is a well-written, well-researched, and well-referenced book by Fariba Bogzaran and Daniel Deslauriers, which also explores the reciprocal relationship between waking life and dreaming life, as well as lucid dreaming.
http://www.sunypress.edu/p-5335-integral-dreaming.aspx
In it I bet you will find more information on this pattern of anxiety-dreams across academics. They do in fact discuss anxiety-dreams, as well as socio-cultural dream patterns, in great detail. Likewise, Carl Jung recognized a collective patterns of apocalyptic dreams prior to WWI, which led him to some of his theory of archetypes in the human consciousness.
The interesting thing for Jerry Coyne to do here, to me, would be to stop at the point of collecting the notes, and start reading them. Forget about finding your dorm, what does that matter? It could be a distraction of sorts, where the notes may contain interesting information, or as Jung would suggest, messages from the subconscious Self. Or maybe there’s a reason this dream character doesn’t want you to have the notes, which you manage to “wheedle” from them anyway.
This post has been therapeutic. Just knowing that most people seem to have the same anxieties helps us to realize we are not crazy after all. 😎
“…we are not crazy after all.”
I wouldn’t go that far. 😉
We’re probably all the same special kinda crazy. 🙂
Yes, “special” we most likely are;-)
It’s probably due to all those rogue heathen neurons we carry around.
It’s like hearding moggies!
Don’t you hate those dreams where you are just falling a sleep and you are walking but you twist your ankle or fall of a curb and your leg jolts you awake? Thanks nervous system, I wasn’t trying to sleep or anything.
Even worse when your human (as opposed to feline and canine) bed-partner has those, and wakes YOU up!
My wife nearly punched out my lights once. I woke her up and told her what happened and she just rolled over and went back to sleep. Pleasant dream?
Hypnagogic jerk!. Could be useful for crosswords or Scrabble. The proposed evo-psych* explanation reads like a just-so story – I wonder if anyone’s tried to test it?
*(Read monkeys for preexistence. – C. Darwin)