Do you still have nightmares about finals, midterms, Phys Ed class, etc. even though you haven't been in school for, like, a decade?

yes -- generally about missing finals, not knowing where the classroom is, not having been to the class ever, etc.

i do not go from project to project. but my college class attendance was pretty spotty.

I still get the occasional dream where I wake up in the morning and realize I have an exam and forgot to study. I finished school seven years ago.

I also sometimes dream that there's some class I forgot to take and my diploma is invalid and because of this I lose my job and have to go back to school.

i have the dream where i've forgotten that i was signed up for the class and not gone to a single session and suddenly i have to take the final.

haha, I've all of the above!

No, I don't have these kinds of dreams, and can't remember when I stopped having them.

If I were going to have them, I'd imagine the phys ed class nightmare would be the one that haunted me. But luckily they don't.

Yeah, what bell labs said. Haven't been to class all term and suddenly either it's test time or grades have come out. I have that one like ALL THE TIME.

I'm living a nightmare where I can't get my masters thesis finished

my seventy-year-old high school basketball coach claimed to have nightmares about letting a guy beat him (on the) baseline (side) in college. i didn't believe him, tho

10 years on, I still have nightmares about suddenly discovering a whole module of A-Level maths that I haven't even started, with the exam in a couple of days.

I had one recently where I didn't go to class all semester and MY MOM was proctoring the exam!

I get more of the college nightmares, but the rare high school ones -- you know the "they found out I didn't take the one class 15 years after the fact, so I have to go back to high school as an old man to take this one class to validate my diploma" template -- are the ones that really are unpleasant.

Then again,
My college years >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> being chased by pinheads in Hell >> my high school years

so I'm a bit biased.

Wow, I guess I'm not the only one who keeps getting these dreams. Yeah, it's always that finals for a particular course are coming up, and I haven't been to one class yet. I keep telling myself that I'll go tomorrow and catch up, but I never do. Awful, awful dream.

My stress dreams are about this kinda thing in two ways: in one i'm back in school, and also, i'm stuck back in ann arbor. Both things are fairly unpleasant.

In fact most of my unpleasant dreams for the last coupla years have involved me being stuck in ann arbor with no means of getting home to portland.

I used to have a recurring nightmare where, toward the end of a semester, I remembered an entire class or two that I'd enrolled in and forgotten to ever attend. Funny thing is that the dreams always ended before exam time, so I never found out if I managed to eke my way through the finals or not.

Funny thing is that, yeah, I still get these despite having been finished undergrad for more than a year now. Sometimes they're about high school too.

read an article recently quoting a study which concluded these were the most common adult "nightmares".

and for the life of me I can't remember ever attending the class

Yeah, I have that one, too. Sometimes in the dream I've been skipping whole weeks of the class and I suddenly realize, at finals time, that it might not have been such a good idea. What I find peculiar about that is that in real life, if I were chronically cutting class (I rarely did in college and never in high school), I'd have been worried long before the day of the exam. Obviously, dreams don't mimic real life, but I wonder why that scenario keeps surfacing: maybe just as a justification for the anxiety?

I also have a related recurring dream in which I'm in a school play and about to go on stage and don't know any of my lines. Same situation, too: it's not that I've forgotten them, it's that I never learned them, am completely unprepared, etc.

(OK, that was a major xpost and I was quoting someone from when this thread was on ILM.)

How awful must school and exams be if we're still so chronically afflicated? Save our kids! Ban school now!

Yeah, every six months, in May/June and November, my brain starts going into exam mood when I'm asleep, even though I finished uni 12 years ago. The usual exam is tomorrow, haven't attended classes or studied in weeks thing.

at least once every two months I have a dream that it's the end of a semester and there's a class I completely forgot I signed up for & didn't attend all semester and just remembered it like 5 minutes before the final

I also sometimes dream that there's some class I forgot to take and my diploma is invalid and because of this I lose my job and have to go back to school.

-- peter in montreal, Monday, August 25, 2008 9:02 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Link

^^^this

I had these dreams for the month or so period after I graduated from school when I was still looking for a job. I remember, in my dreams, being gripped by this feeling like "What will people THINK of me if I can't GRADUATE. I can't believe I can't do MATH."
It is so weird to care so deeply about something in one realm and when you don't really think you give much of a shit about it in another.

oh god why did I fucking read that post

the one above mine

i get all of these too, mostly math related (and i don't even suck at math). even have had the one jaymc mentioned, where i go on stage and don't know the lines b/c i've only been to one or two rehearsals!
yeah, school stress is some damaging shit

I get the "I can't find the classroom" ones now and then: it'll always be the actual high school I went to (and finished at 20 years ago now ffs (holy shit I'm old)), Im always looking at a timetable baffled, thinking "why did I sign up for 3rd level maths when I'm shit at maths and where the hell do they hold this class, I cant remember which rooms did what!"

I wonder why it's so common? Maybe a clash of the logical brain (which knows we have never attended said classes/rooms) and the dream one making the class/exam up?

I had the "never showed up for required math" one LAST NIGHT. But I somehow convinced my counselor/the school to let me take some sort of homeopathy class instead! That's a first.

i have the dream where i've forgotten that i was signed up for the class and not gone to a single session and suddenly i have to take the final.

-- bell_labs, Monday, August 25, 2008 4:07 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

i get this like once every 3-6 months

I have gym class PTSD.

That was extremely hyperbolic. What I mean was, I very much hated gym class. (For my peers – it did make me better at running.)

Surprisingly, none of my nightmares are about gym class.

Oh, I loathed gym. In high school we hade PE and Fitness, two seperate subjects, both involved endless running and sport. The day i walked out of my final PE class at the end of year 10, when it stopped being compulsory--it was one of the best feelings ever.

Yeah we had PE as a subject, and sport as a Weds afternoon unavoidable.. thing. By final year high school I'd had enough: I mean I tried, I did ice skating and squash and basketball, but I just wasn't interested. In yr 12 I signed up for table tennis. We spent the latter part of the year playing table tennis while playing Dalis' Car and Japan on a casette player. Good times.

oh yeah i get dreams about un done homework really often, and they're awful nightmares.

I hated college and dropped out into to a life of ruin, so yes, I still have nightmares about going back. It wasn't ten years ago, but far enough away for me to feel idiotic about it.

I often have dreams about not having started my dissertation and it being due in a week.

I have had a dream about being an adult and being forced to go back to high school a couple of times, and I'm wandering around going "but but but I'm 32!"

i liked PE class (lol partly b/c unlike when playing sports for a team, where i was low A-team or high B-team, in gym class i was like elite athlete ha), but i've had nightmares involving forgetting running shoes, having to run in wrong shoes, failing

i also think fluorescent lights are seriously psyche damaging, ugh

I have one every couple of months where my timetable is too small to read properly and makes no sense and I can't remember where the science classes are.

i have the dream where i've forgotten that i was signed up for the class and not gone to a single session and suddenly i have to take the final.

been having this semi-annually since I finished school. also regularly dream that I'm on the swimming team again and have to compete in a race while half-remembering "gee I quit training in 1977" then I wake up.

I don't have school dreams very often any more, but having worked in radio for a number of years I do have a horrible recurring dream where I'm screwing EVERYTHING up and can't recover.

The song is about to end and I don't have another cued up... scramble to find a new one... dead air... try to play a recorded announcement... it plays only the last 5 seconds... more dead air... let's go to a weather forecast... can't find it... more dead air...news report... why didn't I pre-read these impossibly long names?

I have a lot of dreams wherein I have to carry photocopiers upstairs, which is my post-Kinko's nightmare. (I end up in the old workplace again and it is abt 8x worse than Sisyphean copier-carrying.)

Every once in a while, I'll dream that I have to go back for a year to take one class (usually math). But after freaking out for a minute I realize that I graduated.years ago and then wake up.

since i HAVE started school again i have woken up at three am from dreaming about math

How awful must school and exams be if we're still so chronically afflicated? Save our kids! Ban school now!

-- ledge, Monday, 25 August 2008 17:06 (Yesterday) Link

haha while I don't necessarily agree with the final sentence, I was wondering when someone would get to this salient point.

So what gives?

I mean, I know I've been through far worse shit than anything school related. (high school for me really sucked, granted, but you know, those problems seems kinda trivial now.) In fact, I kinda long to go *back* to school, since I know I'm mature enough now and have actual social skills.

How come I don't get dreams about truly embarrassing things I've done outside school? I don't even get work dreams, and most of my years at work I consider far more stressful and painful than any of my school years.

i used to always have the one where i'd forgotten about a class and hadn't attended in weeks. terrifying!

haven't had it in a few years at least, though.

i had an accounting class last night and woke up from this nightmare of just doing balance sheet after balance sheet after balance sheet after balance sheet. i was so tense.

haha i had that radio dream recently and i haven't even djed in like 12 years

^^^ me too for the radio dream. Can't remember the last time I was on the air, but I have that "dead air" dream constantly.

most of my years at work I consider far more stressful and painful than any of my school years.

Work can be stressful and painful, but only school can be truly embarrassing and humiliating.

ohgod i have had a nightmare where i'm about to go on air and in front of me is a giant, impossible-to-understand, buttons all over the place, half-alive in this cronenbergian sense, mixing board/control panel. and the studio is dark save for all the flashing lights etc on the panel. and it is quiet.

i had a nightmare once in 5th grade that i got a D+ on a math test

i was an A++++++++++ tester

i still have dreams about HS friends where we're in these weird blended situations of past + present though, which are always kind of wtf

at my old job, where i used to spend every hour of my day in this really http://thecatorialist.blogspot.com/database, i'd have dreams that took place INSIDE the database

was it like tron?

ok i have no idea why that link posted there instead of the phrase "unweildy database"

it was like a really, really pointless and boring tron.

so, like tron, then?

haha thecatorialist!