It started with a dream that I lost my notes and couldn’t study. Then I had a dream that I picked up my fianl geol. lab and I only got 8 points on the whole thing (I normally get 90s and above). Then I had a dream that I was on a field trip, and I lost my whole group. It was getting dark out and I still couldn’t find them. I was bawling my eyes out because I was in a strange place and lost. Then I have this feeling, (this isn’t an actual dream), but I keep worrying that something will happen to my computer or printer before I can finish up and print out my big research paper due Tuesday. Finals are next week.
In the dream it’s the night before an exam and I really want to study, but for some reason all the people in my house have decided to kick me out, and I’m not allowed to take any books or notes. So I walk around campus in the freezing cold, crying for a while. Eventually I sit down by a puddle in front of the Student Union…and then realize it’s full of grit from various snow removal attempts. I move it around to create the best study guide ever, completely from memory–it’s for Phonology, so there are all kinds of nice phonemic representations and rules and tables covering the entire plaza–and then lay down to take a nap, thinking I’ll study when I wake up.
Then I’m woken up by some physical plant people with a push broom who insist that they have to brush away the grit right now. I pass out again in the knowledge that I’m going to fail Phonology and not graduate (never mind that apparently I knew the crap well enough to write the study guide from memory), and that’s the end of the dream.
There’ve also been plenty of the forgetting to study and waking up late variety, or the failing everything no matter how hard I work kind.
So yeah, I’d say it’s a pretty standard reaction…I actually feel kind of weird for not having had any (that I can remember) this finals cycle.
The “Unprepared for Exam” dream is a common stress dream, right up there with the “Actor’s Nightmare” or the “Being at School/Work Naked” dream or the “Can’t Find Any Toilets That Aren’t Horrific and I Really Gotta Go Dream.”
So you’re not weird, they are very, very common.
The bad news: I’ve been out of school for almost ten years and I still get the Exam Dream. Often I’m showing up for the exam during the last ten minutes, or I’m writing my name in the top corner and thinking, “gee, I really should have attended classes or bought the textbook… what course is this for?”
Well, I don’t usually remember my dreams (nightmares, perhaps), but lately I’ve been remembering a few. I’ll let you know tomorrow if I have any exam nightmares tonight. I have an exam tomorrow and Tuesday. I haven’t been to any of the lctures and only cracked open the book a few days ago, and today is my first day of real studying. So, pretty much I’m screwed. I’m trying to not let myself break down and decide to drop out of uni. It’ll be a pretty intense next 40 hours or so. I definately plan on sleeping though. I’ve tried the stay up all night thing and I just end up writing nonsense and making all kinds of stupid mistakes. OTOH, I do seem to think more creatively whilst sleep deprivated…
That’s what backups are for. Use a CDR, a USB thumbdrive, or just email it to yourself on a webmail account - better yet, do all three. Backups are what saved my ass after somone stole my laptop.
I’ve been ftp’ing it every night when I’m done working on it to my drive space at school - the only problem is all the computers there have Word, my paper is done in Word Perfect. That should be OK, though, right? I also have a copy on my laptop and on my new PDA (I don’t think I’d be able to print from the PDA).
I always over worry about stuff. When I was younger I wasn’t like this at all.
Last week I dreamt that I had two (2) term papers due and of course I hadn’t worked on all semester, for a chem class and an English lit class.
The kicker is that I was an accounting major who graduated 20 years ago, and I never took a chem class or an English lit class. I did take American Lit but I swear I handed in all my papers, on time and relatively neatly typed. (Back in the stone ages we typed term papers or paid someone to type them for us.)
It has been 37 years since I wrote my last final exam and I still have the dream about taking the final in a class I never attended, never bought the book, never read the book, never registered for and generally knew nothing about. It is followed by the one about being stark, bare ass naked in a public place. Apparently you NEVER get over those two.
My dad, who is in his later 50’s, still has these dreams. I do too.
In school, I usually got them after exams were over, not before–so I’d wake up in a panic, thinking “I’ve got a whole project on the Moon to do!” or something. The weirdest one was where I was taking my Chinese final, and hadn’t studied all semester. I never took Chinese in real life, of course.
Nowadays they tend to be more general–I can’t remember where the class meets, or I forgot all about the class for half of the semester, or something.
ditto here, i get them before and after, but mostly after. The before dreams are usually about test material rather than the test itself; more than once i’ve found myself waking up from a dream about maxwell’s equations or time dependent perturbation theory.
After the exam the dreams are more specific, usually about the exam, but a modified version of it. Often i’ll be convinced that there’s a problem or two that i didn’t answer, maybe on a page that i missed. Even worse are the problems that i “add” to an exam in my dream that weren’t on the real exam, but somehow made it into the version in my dream. The reason they’re worse is that i almost always end up adding a problem that i can’t quite solve, or ones that may not even be possible to solve.
It started in college, probably somewhere around sophomore or junior year, and have shown up once in a while ever since (just finished my first year of grad school).
I think I’ve been a little too stressed out this semester because I’ve been having terrible dreams about giving finals.
I dreamt that my exams didn’t come back from the copy shop in time.
I dreamt that I got my box of exams, carried them into the exam room, opened them up, and found that the exams were entirely written in Cyrillic.
I dreamt that a student stood up during the exam and began shouting that the exam wasn’t fair and that this entire class wasn’t fair and I deserved to be fired. The exam (true to life) was being given in a very large space, so there were at least two other classes in there. Everybody was staring at me—especially the other instructors, whose disapproval was palpable.
shiver
I prefer the dreams where I show up for the test naked or I have to take a test when I haven’t been to class the whole semester.
“Oh my gawd! I have an exam on this today and inexplicably I’ve managed to totally overlook going to any of the classes, doing any of the homework or study a single word for it!”
You never grow out of this dream. Although at least I’ve reached the stage where I can shrug and resign myself to failing the exam rather than having a panic attack about it. That goes with a sense of annoyance that I’m still at school when I really should have left years ago.
I also have the naked one. And the ‘can’t find anywhere suitable to go’ one. Frankly, I’m disappointed with my disgraceful lack of originality and creativity.
Yep. Get used to it, because you will most likely have these dreams the rest of your life. I still dream that I’m back in high school. Or the really bizarre dream I frequently have is that I’m back in elementary school, but I’m an adult!
There’s a hilarious scene in the movie Top Secret, where the hero is being tortured by the bad guys. In the middle of it, he dreams that he’s back in finals week. He then wakes up to realize he’s still being tortured, and gets a look of relief on his face that it was only a dream.
The most bizarre version of the Exam Dream I ever had was about three or four years ago. I dreamt that through some clerical error, my eighth grade class had never properly completed the eighth grade curriculum. As a result of this cerlical error all subsequent diplomas and degrees were null and void until we finished the 8th grade.
So in my dream we all went back to our hometown as full-grown adults in our late twenties, trying to squeeze ourselves into the little desks built for 13-year-olds, and doing the 8th grade all over again in our late 20s.
:eek:
Made me laugh when I woke up, but the dream itself was depressing and stressful!
I took a nap this afternoon (nothing unusual, I am a college student after all), and ended up dreaming about economics. No weird exam nightmares, just dreaming about equations and diagrams I’ve learned. What a terrible dream. The exam is over anyway. Tomorrow, philosophy exam. Could make for more interesting dreams at least. Certainly has to beat dreaming about price discrimination or whatever… Is this dream a sense-datum…hmmm?
Yes. I really think so. When I was in nursing school, I dreamt that my anatomy final was to correctly dissect and correctly label my bf. I complained that I couldn’t; he was still alive. He was sitting there on the lab table, looking around like he didn’t even understand the discussion. The proctor walked over, chloroformed him, and told me I only had 2 hours, so I better get moving.
After the final, I talked with all my classmates, and they had all had horrible nightmares, too. Not necissarily about anatomy (and not nearly as graphic as mine. )
I had a dream where a book my class was reading for English class was in Cyrillic. But fortunately I knew how to read Cyrillic. So only me and the Russian immigrant kid got an A on the reading test.
Use a CDR, a USB thumbdrive, or just email it to yourself on a webmail account - better yet, do all three. Backups are what saved my ass after somone stole my laptop.
You never grow out of this dream. Although at least I’ve reached the stage where I can shrug and resign myself to failing the exam rather than having a panic attack about it. That goes with a sense of annoyance that I’m still at school when I really should have left years ago.
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