I’m 56 now and I can say I still have that dream with some frequency (a few times a year). Sucks.
It’s always nice to wake up though.
Yes but with a caveat…
There are those few seconds of foggy brain when waking where you are still thinking, “Oh shit! I need to write that paper!” (or some version)
For a few years post college I kept my diploma next to my bed because one night, in the middle of the night (like 3a) I woke convinced I had to write a paper due in a few hours and panicking. When I told myself I had already graduated a part of me thought I was just coming up with excuses to go back to bed. It took a lot longer (a couple long minutes) for the reality to sink in. To be fair, that was immediately post college so it was still believable in my head that I had a class paper due in a few hours. Still sucked.
It’s nothing like that now but I still have the, “Oh crap, I didn’t study for this test” dream (or paper is due or some variation).
I had a variation of this dream last night; I was at the end of the semester in an open elective…Sociology, or History…and was way behind in my assigned homework.
I have less than a week to catch up with back assignments before the end of the term.
How nice is it of my brain to at least give me a possible shot at a passing grade.
In any case…
once I had one of those dreams where the first day of class…
OH SHIT…I’m at the WRONG SCHOOL!
So, I spend the majority of the dream in transit between Elementary School, High School, and College.
(Didn’t I notice how much younger my “classmates” were?)
Try “Oh shit! I’ve been forgetting all about feeding that cat who for some reason has been shut up in that room for months!”
I had to count the cats several times over before I could haul myself entirely out of that one.
Well, true. In my most recent one, the Dean of my graduate school sent me an email that I forgot to respond to, and he was so enraged he was threatening to fire me from my (completely unrelated) job if I didn’t prove that I had COVID. Since I was still recovering from COVID, when I first woke up I was trying to figure out what to do to prove that I had COVID when there were no more detectable levels in my system. It took a good long while to sink in that it had all been a dream.
I have some variation of that dream as well. It’s not cats, but fish. I dream about neglecting fishtanks full of fish. The longer I neglect them, the more I’m afraid to look in the tanks. Then I have to worry about concealing the dirty fish tanks from other people.
I presume this is about avoidance and imposter syndrome, or something.
I had that dream a few days ago (and it is recurrent too) except it was my dog who I forgot to walk or feed for a week.
And I do not even have a dog (I have had many pets, including many dogs, over my lifetime but I do not have one currently). I remember forgetting to feed my dog once when I was a teenager. I felt really bad about that then. Guess it stuck with me.
I’ve always assumed my lack of anxiety on exams is why I never get that dream. I was always was more concerned with social stuff, so that’s usually where my dreams go. Or I get worried they’ll figure out I’ve already graduated (though I usually think I graduated just a year ago). I also often wind up being in college and wind up getting lost, which was something I was always concerned about. (It’s easier to get lost in dreams, since I apparently always exist in a non-Euclidean space where turning around does not take me back where I came from.)
Omigosh, yes! I’ll go down to the basement that I forgot I had and there will be these giant fish tanks that I also forgot I had, for years. Somehow the fish are always miraculously OK. And I haven’t had a basement or fish IRL in 65 years. The collective unconscious is as weird as spooky action at a distance!
I don’t know the answer to the OP, but I’m sure it would be in one of the Chinese manuals of dream interpretation, since those go back centuries and taking exams was such a central part of the Imperial system.
“I was being chased by an eight-legged essay…”
According to Chinese dream theory:
Even those who have been away from school for many years sometimes find that they return to that environment in their dreams, taking an exam again in their dreams. The nervous feeling of sitting down to take a certain test can be so real, even if it is just a dream!
If you dream about taking an exam or undergoing some form of review, the dream highlights the anxiety or tension you are encountering in your waking life. Whether in your professional life, personal life, or even academic life, this dream tells you that you are facing a worrying situation that you are not prepared for.
I just had a dream about taking a test after never attending class. Naturally, I had no idea of what I was doing. I waited until time was up and the professor was collecting tests from the students remaining in the class.
I explained to the professor that I hadn’t done well for whatever reason. Unfortunately, this was the same professor who had been in a previous dream and she wasn’t buying my excuse.
I often have a variation of that dream - I’m back in a certain grade, let’s say 4th grade for instance, with the teacher I had back then and the same classmates who are the same age as they are then, but I’m my current age and nobody believes me when I insist that I’m in my 40s and I graduated decades ago.
I’ve taken a fair number of tests in real waking life for which I never had the class, and usually do pretty well on them, so that’s never been how that dream manifests for me.
But “I forgot that class was on my schedule and therefore I haven’t done any of the work”, or “I didn’t actually graduate from high school due to some technicality”? Yeah, I’ve absolutely had those.
It’s always an 8:30am Tuesday -Thursday class that my dreams insist I forgot about attending. And it’s always math-heavy.
I might be setting my son up for the plot of his school dreams when he’s older; he was in kindergarten when the school year was suspended due to covid. I like to jokingly remind him that no matter how successful he is and will be, he’ll still have never graduated from kindergarten.
I’ve had the “I forgot I signed up for this class” and the “I don’t know my schedule” but not the exam one.
I retired about 18 months ago and since then I’ve had a dream where I’m back at work and suddenly realize that I didn’t need to be there. A strange bit is that in the dream I’m always in an office but in reality I worked from home for the last 8 years.