I had another one last night. They’re down to a few times a year and they have lost most of their nightmarish qualities, but I still get them after 13 years. The details are different every time, but there are some common themes. Usually they’re not about actually being in school, but realizing that I have to go back, and dreading it. The dread is almost overwhelming. Sometimes there are other things to dread too, like forgetting my class schedule, or my locker combination. In the last few years the dreams usually end with my realizing that I don’t really have to go back (that I have the option of dropping out of school, or running away to Alaska, or that I have already graduated). The sense of relief is so liberating! But for the first 10 years out of school it wasn’t until after I woke up that I realized I didn’t really have to go back.
God, I hated high school! I remember people telling me back then that I should enjoy myself in high school. “These are the best years of your life.” Thank God they were lying.
Oh hell yes. Forgetting where my locker is, or its combo, or where the next class is. I mostly have these deams in stressful times, but lately Ive just been sitting at my locker, with it open, and not going anywhere. Paging Dr Freud?
Always the one where you realize on exam week that you failed to drop that class you mean to after the first day and now it’s too late. Dilemma: do you beg the dean to let you drop late and get an X or cram and go to the final and hope for a D. That’s when you wake up sweating the decision.
Hell yes. But I too still am a high school-ite.
Back in the summer, I had summer work to do for my AP History and English classes…and as school approached, I had all these horrible dreams in which I hadn’t yet done any of it, or had to do it…Ugh…
Maybe I’ll appreciate these dreams when I’m done with educating myself? You know, i’ll have bad dreams but nothing else…hopefully.
I still have them once every few months, and they’re always along the lines of that my life has gone on as normal (I’m now 25), but I have to go back and repeat English (or some other subject).
I think the nightmares started again a couple of years ago when I made the mistake of doing some teaching work experience at my old school.
As for the ‘best years of your life’ - I have a friend who’s become a really good friend, almost entirely based on the fact he told me, during my last year of high school, that this is a complete lie!
I get those dreams all the time. Lately I’ve been having them about college and law school, too.
The most common theme is that I oversleep and miss an important test, usually a final. Either that or I show up with only a short time to go. Sometimes in the dream I realize that I completely forgot I was taking one class and I had to take the final after not being there all semester.
Can you tell it’s getting to be finals time again?
I’m twenty-four but look about sixteen. Every six months or so I dream about being captured by truant officers and force-marched back to Algebra II. When I try to protest than I’m really a grown-up, they just laugh in my face.
Almost always, they involve being my current age, but finding out something went “wrong”, and I wasn’t actually supposed to graduate HS, or go to college. So my ENTIRE college record is erased, and I have to go back, finish HS, and then go back to college if I want my degree back. Yipe!
Anthracite-I have the same type! I’ll be in college, but I have to go back and complete something in high school-or worse-back in PAROCHIAL school! And it sucks, because I have to sit through classes where I know everything!
Holy shit, can you imagine going to back to High School now? I mean, I bet most of us breezed through high school with a 3.5 and didn’t even go to class half the time. At least, I know I did. sigh I should have applied myHigh school was so watered down for the dumb kids that it was bloody easy for the smart kids.
I can’t even imagine what it would be like to go now.
Hell, at my ripe old age of 24 I could even date a teacher or two. Cool.
No, I don’t have dreams about high school anymore.
High school does still come in handy occasionally for me.
It’s been twelve years since I graduated, and no matter how hard life gets, how down I get, how depressed, lonely, sick of it all, fed up, pissed off at myself and life… I can always say to myself, “Well, at least I’m not in high school anymore.”
I dropped out of High School when i was fifteen and went on to get my diploma at a college where there were none of the bullshit rules that they have in high school. Most of my nightmares are of going back to H.S. and immediately getting in trouble for lighting up a cigarette or leaving for lunch or something. I’ve had a few cool ones though that were like time-travel adventure dreams where i had to go back and right some terrible wrong.
Btw - “Back to school” is the only recuring dream ive ever had but i get it ALOT (of course its not the same exact dream every time but same theme)
I had a typical “back in high school dream” and mentioned it to my mother. She said she still has those too. Can’t remember the locker combination, late for class, didn’t study for the test, etc. My mother is almost 60.
So we may keep having these dreams the rest of our lives. No! NO!!!
That is so depressing that Lesa’s mom still has the high school dreams!
Mine are about being called upon to go back to high school (I graduated 13 years ago) and when I get there, I’m expected to know all my lines from the drama club plays I was in. Everyone is just disgusted that after 13 years, I don’t remember my lines from such gems as “Our Town” and “The Importance of Being Ernest.” I ruin the entire production, and am hated and mocked by all.
It’s almost enough to make me learn them again, just in case.
Well, shit. Not 30 second ago i decided not to post on the Recurring Dream thread cause the only really RECURRING dream I have is my awful I’m back in high school dream. And I’m thinking about it and bam, here this is.
Sometimes I’m going to highschool as a backdrop for another unrelated dream (like the one I had recently about somebody I’m mad at coming and begging my forgivness. A great dream. Which, for no good reason took place between classes.)
They’re not exactly nightmares. I’m never that worried when I realize I haven’t been to class in months and the final is tommorrow. The annoying thing is, unlike biblophage, remembering I’m too old to be there never helps. For the purposes of the dream, I have to go back and retake something I didn’t pass. Or they invalidate my college diploma.
High School…long boring, dreary afternoons, stretching off into infinity…nodding off in French class, waking up to see the snarling face of the teacher…what a horror!
