<p>Funny - I never have this dream because it’s pretty much inconceivable to me. I often find myself sweeping up leaves in some sort of competition, but the American flag is always hoisted up somewhere behind me before I can finish. </p>
<p>To make your terrifying dreams go away, all you have to do is sit down and think hard about the situations they pose. In dreams, your subconscious is mentally steeling yourself for adverse situations, so if you think about these situations (using your conscious mind, of course), they will go away. Sleep tight.</p>
<p>From the Dream You Didn’t Study article that was linked to by dmd77 in post 15:</p>
<p>"At a time when standardized tests pervade education from grade school to grad school, it is easy to forget just how recent a concept meritocracy actually is. As Nicholas Lemann points out in his book ‘‘The Big Test,’’ the term did not even enter common parlance until a 1958 work by the British intellectual Michael Young, ‘‘The Rise of the Meritocracy.’’ Even then, the United States required a major expansion of public universities and the proliferation of the Scholastic Aptitude Test to create what Mr. Lemann describes as ‘‘an inarguably sacred first principle: that our society rewards those who deserve and have earned advancement, rather than distributing reward by fiat in some way that involves the circumstances of birth.’’
With so much riding on academic performance, then, a companion set of anxieties took up residence in the subconscious, as not only innumerable dreamers but the psychiatrists and psychologists who study sleep and dreams are keenly aware.</p>
<p>‘‘You get a feel from a dream for the soul of the dreamer,’’ said Dr. Melvin Lansky, a clinical professor of psychiatry at U.C.L.A.'s medical school, in a telephone interview from his office in Los Angeles. '‘One thinks that this dreamer is ambitious, hard-driving, feeling like ‘all the pressure’s on me,’ and maybe struggling with the part of himself that wants to relax, even goof off. And what makes the mind distraught are the feelings, ‘I can’t do it, I’m not prepared.’ And, ‘It’s my fault.’ So you get the guilt, the shame, the feeling of being exposed. I’ll bet Prince Charles wouldn’t have such dreams. His place doesn’t depend on merit.’"</p>
<p>It’s an archetypal dream, often with variations. Sometimes I dream I have a client waiting and am too far away to get there on time or other variations of the same theme. I think it is tied to the anxiety that we may have forgotten something very important in our lives – left something undone until it is too late to do it properly. That is probably an anxiety that never goes away and, as we age, we are even more aware of how easily we can and do forget to take care of things.</p>
<p>It is so funny that over 25 years from my last university class and I still have dreams of not showing up for the final, or having forgotten that I was enrolled in a class!</p>
<p>RE: post #21. My subconscious must really be prepared for war.</p>
<p>It is a relief to know so many other people have the missing class/final dream. I’ve had those nightmares on a regular basis since graduating college in 1986. I always attributed it to having to take 21 hours my last semester, while working 25 hours during the school week, then commuting home and working 20 hours on the weekend. Those were some of the worst 16 weeks of my life. I keep really close tabs on S’s credit hours so that he can graduate on time without a semester like that. At least maybe I can help him prevent future nightmares!</p>
<p>In recent years it has morphed into the dream someone mentioned where you have to go back to HS or college to graduate. I keep dreaming that I have forgotten to go to one class in my final semester, will therefore flunk, and so can’t graduate.</p>
<p>I have all sorts of variations on the dream… didn’t study, forget to go to class, arriving naked…</p>
<p>I never stopped having them after college and now that I’m in grad school (at age 46) they probably never will.</p>
<p>One difference for me: I REALLY MISSED A FINAL IN COLLEGE!!! I went to our classroom at what I thought was the time of the final and there were other students in there in the middle of an exam.</p>
<p>I went to the professor’s office, knocked on the door, he answered, and in reply to my question of where the final was being held, he answered: “YOU MISSED IT. IT WAS THIS MORNING.”</p>
<p>Luckily, he knew me because I always attended class and participated. He gave me a copy of the exam and a blue book, told me to go to the library and turn it in the the departmental secretary when I was done. wow.</p>
<p>Let’s see . . . As an adult, I’ve had several variations of The Dream - everything from not being prepared for the French final in junior high (I was very good at French) and not being prepared for the high school math final (I was not all that great at math) to not having my high school math homework done (yep, math was hard.) The math dreams always included my junior high and high school classmates (we moved in a herd from math class to math class throughout junior high and high school) who intimidated the heck out of me because of how smart they were. (Why was I in the top math class with them, anyway?!)</p>
<p>I stopped having The Dream once I hit my 40’s. Around the age of 47, I started having The Dream again - only this time I am teaching the course, haven’t shown up all semester, and haven’t written the final. The students all leer at me because they ARE prepared for the final. (Now retired, I taught college for 20+ years in real life.)</p>
<p>Mine is that it is graduation day and I’m dressed but I remember that I have one more final to take and am running around campus trying to find the classroom for the final. It stopped in my 40s.</p>
<p>HAH! My S didn’t dream it, he lived it…almost.</p>
<p>Final day arrives, son is in dorm, sleeping… :eek: Class starts, Professor wants to know where S is…no one has seen him. His friends call his cell phone - no answer! Professor makes 2 kids run across campus to check his room and have to arouse S from deep sleep (fell asleep studying for said final). Wake him up, drag him to class to take the final. He looked like crap when he got to class. He passed!</p>
<p>I still have the college exam anxiety dream on occasion, 35 years after graduating, in one of several varieties. Even though I went to law school, it is always a math exam (was a math major). My college age S told me yesterday, he had the dream about a course he hasn’t even taken yet, forgot to drop it, 9 am final, wakes up at 9:43. I wondered after he told me, is there an equivalent anxiety dream for people who didn’t go to college?</p>
<p>The dream I’ve had isn’t that I’ve missed a final or forgot to study, but that the teacher has added a new exam after school as ended and I can’t get to it.</p>
<p>Another with the classic forgot about the class and now have an exam dream–many times. Probably even in the last year 30 years after college. Always happy to wake-up and find it was just that dream again. My job basically involves writing a new term paper every week so that might have something to do with it–always a new deadline in my mind.</p>
<p>Someone mentioned dreaming about not being able to open their locker – I still periodically dream that I’m back in junior high school and that I either can’t find my locker or can’t remember the combination.</p>
<p>I’ve also had the shoe dream since childhood – that I’m out somewhere, or at school or at work, and suddenly look down and realize that I’m barefoot or wearing slippers. (The latter actually happened to me once when I was about 5, and I’ve never forgotten!) </p>
<p>It’s odd that despite more than 30 years as a lawyer, I haven’t had work-related anxiety dreams nearly as much as academic ones. A few times, though, I’ve dreamed that I find out that papers are due to be filed in court the next day, on a case I didn’t even know I was supposed to be working on.</p>
<p>I don’t necessarily buy that academic anxiety dreams are a recent phenomenon; my father’s told me that he’s had them once in a while for the last 75 years or so!</p>
<p>Overall, though, I don’t have this kind of nightmare very much anymore. The recurring nightmares that I remember these days generally have to do with (1) something awful happening to my cat; or (2) being told that I have to go back to the way I used to be. Thank God I’ve only had nightmares about something awful happening to my son once or twice that I can remember; I don’t think I could handle having too many dreams like that. Unfortunately, I’ve always had problems with anxiety; taking medications for it the last few years (first lexapro and now cymbalta) has helped significantly in reducing my general anxiety level, and my tendency to feel anxious even about bad things that didn’t actually happen – but could have! It’s probably helped in reducing my dream anxieties too.</p>
<p>As a former trial lawyer – I stopped practicing law in the mid 90’s – I am also plagued by the trial-I-didn’t-prepare-for and client-I-didn’t-know-I-represented dream. In this one I arrive at the courthouse wholly unprepared and sometimes unclothed. Usually, however, if I manage to dress appropriately I also manage to pull things off in court. (Sometimes you just have to give them the old razzle dazzle)</p>
<p>Another recurrent dream, which fortunately has subsided since the kids went off to college – the I forgot to pick up the kid at day care dream, which I had long after my kids had outgrown the need for supervised after-school care. In that dream, however, the day care center was always at some remote, inaccessible location, whereas in real life the day care was generally within a few blocks from our house or on the school site. Also I did have a couple of real life <em>forgot to pick up kid from school</em> episodes, and in real life there was always a “where are you?” phone call within about 20 minutes of the appointed time. So I’m not quite sure why there was a need to get so freaked out over the event in dreamland.</p>
<p>I didn’t know anyone else had the shoe dream! I used to have it when I was getting ready to go to a conference to give a research presentation. I would dream that I had a whole suitcase full of shoes but none of them matched, or I only had slippers. One of my coworkers used to wish me luck before a conference by saying, “I hope your talk has shoes!”</p>
<p>I always thought shoes were a strange way to express anxieties, since I worked in a field where it was fine to wear birkenstocks at conferences.</p>