I’m an “unprepared for exam” kind of guy.
I’ve been out of school for a number of years, but I still have recurring nightmares about finals I didn’t know were coming.
Never exactly the same (tonight was an exam on logical operators? which I know pretty well out here in the real world?) but some things are usually constant:
- I always find out days before a final exam that I was enrolled in a class I needed to graduate, but never attended because I didn’t know it was on my schedule
- I’m always the only person who is unprepared, and the Professor is always cognizant of this fact
- I always decide not to study in the buildup, and completely wing it (c’mon, dream me! Get it together!)
- The exam is always “high stakes” – meaning there will be very negative consequences if I don’t pass.
- The exam room always feels like it’s oriented incorrectly – this one is hard to explain, but do you ever walk into a room and everything is oriented right-to-left instead of left-to-right?
- I always wake up right as time for the exam runs out, so I never find out the results
And for what it’s worth – I did very well in school. This never happened to me, so I don’t know where this one comes from, save for general preparedness-anxiety.
Sometimes I wake up and read up on the topic … for next time.
What about you, kbeans / Lemmings? What haunts your sleep?
I’ve dreamed multiple times about being back in highschool, being late for classes or not studying for exams. It’s almost like it traumatized me lol
For years I had recurring dreams where I was lost wandering an endlessly large building - usually office buildings with hundreds of hallways and stairwells that led to more endless hallways. Haven’t had them as often the last few years but they always left me feeling down the next day.
I’m nearly fifty, thirty years since I last did a school exam, and I still have recurring dreams about them. Weird, because I didn’t have any stress or anxiety at the time… at least not conscious stress.
My dream takes the same basic form as yours. I am approaching a time when I know there should be an exam, but I haven’t been to the class at all for the year. Mostly the dream consists of me hoping no-one will mention the exam and I can just kind of pass it by default. It makes no sense.
Other recurring dreams:
- I stumble on a previously unknown room in my house
- My Grandad, who has been dead over 20 years, is suddenly alive again. Everyone knows he should be dead, no-one really mentions why he’s alive again, and there’s a weird feeling that he’s hanging around on borrowed time.
An extra room in the house? Sounds like a dream to me, haha. What kind of stuff do you find in those?
cries in nowhere to store things
Teeth. Hasn’t happened for a while but there was a time when they were always growing or falling out.
I hear it’s pretty common.
I used to dream about my teeth falling out pretty often, and then those dreams stopped. I think its because as I’ve gotten older, the idea of losing my teeth doesn’t freak me out anymore. My subconscious has removed that nightmare from the regular rotation since its no longer effective.
All of my dreams are freaking random weirdness. if anybody wants to spend some time analyzing them, my most recent one, the most memorable thing was some weird russian dude trying to get me to try some disgusting looking frozen “Borscht-Chessie” pizza.
only thing I can thing of is I was reading something about the Ukraine war before bed… and had frozen grease on a shingle pizza for dinner. (that was pepperoni and I added some spicy pickled red onions to it.)