Stress Dreams about School

[canyonwalker]

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).

Comments

[sorcyress]

Oooo, maybe I should look into that one. Although I suspect the "what stress dreams tell us" is gonna be "we're stressed!"

I always have teacher-anxiety dreams a few times around the beginning of the school year, but this year they've been continuing, once or twice a week for about six weeks now. It is extremely exhausting. (A teacher-anxiety dream is basically your above dream except that I'm theoretically in charge of the class that's about to happen, only I'm not prepared, the students are here early, and my boss has come in for observation. Sometimes there are charming variations, like when I had to teach art instead of math.)

~Sor

[canyonwalker]

The common root of these dreams is worry about being unprepared. It's not just forgetting there's an exam or a term paper due. Getting on the school bus and realizing you forgot to wear pants is another common variation. It totally makes sense teachers would have stress dreams from the other side of the desk. It's the first day and you didn't prepare *any* lesson plans, or there's 44 kids in the class, or you've been assigned the wrong subject, etc.