I don’t know if other people have this dream or it’s just people like me who did not graduate high school, but last night I had to go get my diploma at near fifty years old. I didn’t actually get through the doors of the institution in this dream, however. This dream changed its natural course before I got there, and turned into a species of frustration dream.
Originally it was going to be my brother and I going back to high school, and down in San Francisco, so we were going to fly there. But I couldn’t find the plane tickets at the last minute, couldn’t find my brother, and went rampaging around looking for them. Gradually it became clear the reason I couldn’t find anything was that this was a dream, and I had never needed to go back to school, or go anywhere.
Was it a dream though? I didn’t know I was dreaming at the time, only knew that the element where I had to go back to school was false. Competing theories filled my head. Was it a dream I had taken for real, or a delusion? Was I becoming prematurely demented? This was very upsetting, changing things into a nightmare.
At that point it shifted focus into gathering books and papers that had accidentally been left out in the parking lot, not having enough hands, all that kind of shit. But the larger problem remained; I had no idea why I had thought I needed to go back to school, and it tore me up.
As I woke up, I had to pass through a hypnopompic state where the dream still felt real, so I was very focused on figuring out what’s real, like I could reason my way through it instead of just finishing waking up and letting the whole crisis melt away on its own. At least it was much less emotionally intense by that point.
After that I fell asleep again, for a dream where i had a job with nebulous duties and a malevolent boss, which involved a little bit of actual cat herding.
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Hel yeah, I frequently have to go back to school or university in my dreams. Usually it turns out I have yet to take a course I didn’t know about or realize I had skipped classes all year. In one more interesting variant the subject was black magic and the other pupils were a bit creepy – except for a rather attractive dark elf who was on my side.
Mostly the dreams are rather frightening, as I had some serious anxietys concerning my exams. Nearly failed school because of them and still can’t believe I actually managed to finish uni – or did I?
@mordred
I frequently have a very similar dream: even though I have my HS diploma, and subsequent MSc and PhD, I sometimes dream that I accidentally missed one course in high school, so I have to go back and do it or all else is invalidated. Except I’m now wandering the hallways of my old high school, I don’t understand my roster, and I can’t find my classroom.
I’m a fairly lucid dreamer, so this is the point where I can usually decide to go dream about something else, else I’d be wandering the hallways of my old school, lost forever.
I’ve had various such dreams over the years,but the one relatively more recent usually involves my being enrolled in something resembling my old college, and realizing that I have missed months of classes, and have no idea even where the classes are meeting, and for some reason it has suddenly become important to try to catch up, perhaps because finals are coming up or something. It’s not entirely clear what I’ve been doing all this time, but somehow just never went, and lost track. Fortunately when I wake up I remember eventually that I graduated from college already, so since that happened in 1968, it’s probably not too urgent.
At some point, it becomes less stressful to finish the GED paperwork than it is to have the dreams.
i used a GED to get into college, got an associates and a bachelors degree, and i still have the dreams. no escape from the aeternal school.
@1 mordred
@3 M. Currie
That’s the one I have frequently. I’m there for the final exam, I’ve never set foot in class before, I don’t even understand the subject. The pressure is on.
It’s typically a subconscious way of processing with anxiety over things that need doing, and I too have had similar on many occasions. Though on at least one occasion I had a flip-side positive version in which I was going to get to go through medical school again and enjoy the whole experience over again with the extra confidence and appreciation I’d acquired over decades since then (at least, until it occurred to me in the dream that I would have to pay for it second time around and had no obvious way of doing so, which put a bit of a damper on things).
I’ve thought about it but I’ve never had a school/exam anxiety dream.
I was a pretty mediocre student in high school and university. I just di’n’t GAF.
I used to have those school/uni dreams, but no longer do.
Too long ago, too much other shit since those days, I reckon.
Now, the only similarly thematic ones are about being at work (I retired in 1997).
(One pattern for me: I am always stymied and frustrated, but of course I persevere nonetheless.
Whatever it may be — going somewhere, finding my desk, getting some lunch, finding someone — I never can.
(Most psychological!)
doc sarah, if you’d been signed in when you commented, your name woulda been a link back to your blog. yer missin out on yer SEO!
–EDIT: i added the link myself
how you doin’?
i’m coo. i said i wasn’t going to be posting as much for a while. just staying in the sidebar and staying alive.
i forgot, is polite to return the question. how you doin’?
my husband says i shouldn’t do a post comparing the bulges of 80s musicians, but there’s a perfect tie-in to paleontology news bc the new dino called haolong dongi. wotta waste.
Maybe once every year and a half on the average, I have extremely long, vivid dreams which feel in some ways more real than reality, but less real in others, and which I recall better than a lot of real events. Only one directly involved school… or at least only one since I was actually in school, which was decades ago.
Basically, I got a job as a substitute teacher at a high school – not something I’ve done in real life, though I did act as a teacher’s assistant during my senior year as an elective – but for some reason, the staff kept insisting that I was a student. Attempting to point out how little sense that made just caused them to go blank and then continue as if I said nothing. Eventually I gave up and played along with being a student… I was still getting paid, after all… but then some government agents showed up, claimed that I was an “anomaly”, and interviewed me to make sure that I wasn’t using my paranormal nature to mess with people on purpose. The rest of it had nothing to do with school, though, but involved a paranormal research agency, meeting other “anomalies”, and an environment with severely warped non-euclidean geometry.
There was another which involved a school indirectly, in that I doing some linguistics for work for an anthropology department from a real-world university, but I wasn’t directly involved with the university itself and only stopped at it a couple times briefly. If you’re wondering why they didn’t just collaborate with their own school’s linguistics department, let’s just say that it involved some blind, underground-dwelling people who spoke in an alien-sounding click-heavy language and used echolocation, and the anthropologists were desperate to find someone who could figure out how to communicate with them.
I guess those don’t really count, though? The first could maybe be interpreted as starting out as a rather unconventional school-anxiety dream, but I don’t think I really experienced it on that level, as the mood was more annoyance than anything else. My rare “anxiety dreams” aren’t of the highly vivid sort, and as far as I can recall, have never involved school, but usually involved not being able to find my way out of a labyrinthine building of some kind. Maybe the difference is caused by how I was never really that worried about school-related things back when I was attending them.
Bébé
I’m OK.
OMG I hate it when my computer just restarts itself.
chigau, you run Windows?
If so, go to Windows Update → Advanced options panel and have a look.
(Can’t postpone them forever, but you can control it more than not at all)
John
I don’t object to the updates, I just hate surprises.
On the schlong subject, there’s also an olympic “crotchgate” scandal involving artificial bulges contributing to ski jump distances. Just saying, the stars seem to be aligning here.
snowberry – that’s an epic comment, and more on-topic than what i’ve been up to. thx.
chigau – i think his advice was help to minimize the surprises. i like ok. i’ll take ok any day of the week.
currie – is that a vote in favor? my husband’s reasoning was compelling, don’t wanna objectify, plus like, it would be sexual harassment if i worked with depeche mode or the damned.