To my subconscious:
I left graduate school six years ago. So why do you feel compelled to keep giving me dreams about school? The worst ones are the ones where I wake up and I’m not sure which is real- the dream where I was still in school, or my waking life, in which I have a master’s and have been out of school for several years.
Curiously, I never dream about grad school. However, I’ve had several dreams where I went back to college. I’m always a bit disappointed when I realize it’s a dream, because I had a great time in college.
I almost never dream about grad school now that I’m out. But everything before that is fair game- college, high school, even kindergarten on one occasion 
It wouldn’t be so bad if the dreams usually were about the good times I had in school. But no, they’re usually about things like just starting at a new school and not being able to find any of my classes, or forgetting about a class until the semester is almost over, or an idiotic and difficult project in a class.
Oh yeah, I’ve had those, too. For some reason it’s always a high school math class, even though I really didn’t have any trouble with math. Maybe it’s to make it extra angsty, because you can’t even BS your way through a math test.
It’s because something is stressing you out. Once in a while I still dream about the nightmare that was waiting tables, which I last did fifteen years ago.
Examine what’s stressing you out, fix it, and the bad dreams should stop. Easy, right? 
I am 45 and have experienced high school, college, and graduate school. I never dreamed about grad school; rarely had dreams about college; but often dreamed about high school or junior high! I think my last dream about school (it was a high school dream) occurred about three or four years ago. During my twenties and thirties, it seems I had “school dreams” about once a month!
Mine are almost all about when I was about high school age (once in a while, it’s about community college) and come in two flavors:
–It’s the last day of the school year and either I’ve not gone to school at all that year or have consistantly skipped a certain class. I feel compelled to go, even though I know there will a huge test that I haven’t studied for in the least. I take a long, long time getting ready to go, while wondering why I even should.
–It’s the very end of the last day of the school year and I’m getting my stuff that has accumulated all year together so I can leave. There is more and more and more stuff and I know, since I’m walking, I can’t carry it all in one trip. Everyone else has left but the teacher, who is usually somewhere else. I keep wondering why I didn’t start carrying some home each day rather than let it all pile up and I think about asking the teacher if he or she will be in on another day when I can pick the rest up. I never do.
With both dreams, I wake up before actually leaving.
Anne, in case you’re wondering, your school dreams never really go away. You may not have one for a long, long time but they’re there in your subconscious, lurking. Believe me, I know. Next year is the 30th anniversary of my high school graduation.
My dad is nearly 60 and still has them. I don’t think they go away. I know I have them every so often; usually I haven’t gone to some class for months and have tons of stuff due, and there’s an exam coming. Once I dreamed about a final in Chinese, and kept saying to myself, “I knew I should have stuck with Russian!”
You had me worried there for a minute, Anne. I thought you were echoing Ellis Dee’s pit rant about the “Name 100 Characters” threads by calling for the mods to issue a cease-and-desist order to those Dopers who like to post about dreams.
I’m relieved to discover that’s not the case, so I’ll concur with my fellow Class of 1977 member Tikki in assuring you that the school dreams continue into middle age and beyond. I was in a few plays as a collegian, so it’s not surprising that my subconscious is fond of the “you’re due on stage in five minutes and you haven’t bothered to learn your lines” scenario. I also have dreams in which I can’t find my schedule and thus don’t know to which class I’m supposed to go next, as well as nightmares that involve looking frantically through my books and papers for a clean sheet on which to write. There are also variations on the “I never really graduated and thus have to go back to high school/college in order to make up a course I missed”, as well as dreams in which I’m still an undergraduate (and living in a dorm) after matriculating ten or twenty years ago.
People from all stages of my life are wont to appear in these dreams. I may be in high school with actual classmates of the era, along with people I first met in college, folks I know here in Lafayette (I moved from Ohio in 2001), and random celebrities. Maybe some SDMB members will crash my next one!
Yeah, the due-on-stage thing. As often as not, the problem is compounded by there being some unauthorised edits to the script. In extreme cases, I can’t even remember what the show is.
I end up going back to school every once in a while, and also back to university (unresolved guilt for having flunked out, I guess).
I hate them, it is always high school. Either I cant find my class room [it has been moved] or I cant remember my schedule, or I cant find my locker, or I cant remember the combination. No matter which problem it is, I am always horribly late to class 
And I also have ‘got to make an important call’ and I cant remember the number, I cant dial [yep, rotary phone, I grew up with them] or cant dial on the keypad, or I keep dialing the wrong number and have to keep restarting
I have a similar nightmare all the time. Usually it’s only a few days till the final exam and I’ve not gone to that class at all.
My mom says she has college nightmares too. In her case it’s the end of the senior year and she realizes she doesn’t have enough credits to graduate.
What a strange thread. I have the same dreams. Usually high school, something like last day of the semester and I haven’t made it to math class at all. Or the big test tomorrow and I haven’t cracked a book. And mine are usually about math class, too.
It seems to be about despair, realizing that failure is certain and there is no time to do anything about it. Opportunity wasted. Time’s up.
OK, I can relate to all of that, it just seems strange that it would manifest itself in dreams about school for so many people. Was school the yardstick of success or failure in so many people’s lives, even years or decades after the fact?
Nah, just venting a wee bit at my subconscious for giving me yet another school dream on Monday night.
I have dreams about missing the school bus almost monthly…and I’m in my 30’s. The only difference between my school bus dreams now versus my school bus dreams in high school is that about half of the time I wind up having to teach the class when I get there. Thank you, grad school.
Man, just last night I had a dream where, like in real life, I had just been accepted to graduate school, but in the dream I was still in college as oppossed to having graduated two years ago. In addition, in the dream, I had apparantly dropped a couple classes because they were hard, yet I needed trhem to graduate, so now I couldn’t go to grad school since I wouldn’t actually graduate on time.
As oppossed to the real reason I won’t be able to go to graduate school, which is because I can’t afford it. 
I’m not sure why, but it seems rare for me to have a dream about school. I cannot recall ever having a dream about college or grad school, nor can I recall having a dream about junior high and high school. Not sure if it was because I found junior high and high school so disagreeable (from a social perspective, not from an academic perspective).
Oddly enough, the only dream about school I can recall off-hand is one that I had a few years ago. The dream took me back to early elementary school, like the first, second, or third grade. (I went to a one-room private school for those grades, so memories of those times all kind of blur together.) I remember in this dream asking classmates what was going on, that I didn’t belong there, that I had already graduated from college and even had a master’s degree. I asked the the teacher if there was any way I could be excused for the day so that I figure out how to get back to my own time. She didn’t believe me and sent me back to my school work.
Weird.
When I started teaching college (math, by the way) those dreams went away. They were replaced by another dream I would have regularly: It’s the end of the semester and there’s a course I forgot to teach.
It’s been TWELVE years for me, and I still have the dream where I have a test and/or a paper due for a class I ditched all semester.
No…it’s not a dream…it’s a fricking scary-assed nightmare.
I HATE it.