Stress Dreams about School

I've been skipping class in one of my college electives. I've skipped so much I'm not even sure where the class is. I'm hopelessly behind on homework assignments. At this point there's likely no way not to fail. And it's so late in the semester I can't even drop the class anymore.

This is dream, fortunately. It's a dream I've had 2-3 times in the past year, though. The weird thing is I haven't been in school for decades. Why I am still having dreams like this?

It turns out this type of dream is fairly common, I learned in a radio program on KQED yesterday. The details aren't the same from person to person, but the broad strokes are. There's a class. It's in college or high school. Maybe it's calculus, maybe it's Russian history. We haven't prepared. A paper's due, or there's a final tomorrow, and we're totally not ready. And, as is my case, it's not an immediate stress. We're not in school anymore. Many of us haven't been in school for decades when these stress dreams occur. And it's not just a modern phenomenon. There are records from thousands of years ago about Chinese people having stress dreams about the Civil Service Exams. Listen to What Stress Dreams Tell Us About Our Waking Lives (KQED Forum, 30 Sep 2022).