Have you had the "college dream"?

In My Humble Opinion
21

What, 20 posts without the XKCD link?

I’ve had it. I’ve also had one a few times where I discover I missed a course way back when, and have to go back to high school to make it up, and where I find myself awkwardly out of place among the much younger students.

And the most common form of my naked-in-public dreams involves me forgetting to wear clothes, and then having to improvise a sort of toga from my old baby blanket, which I was rather attached to until I was about 10. No, I don’t know why I have my baby blanket with me in my dream, even when I’ve forgotten my clothes.

On the flip side, I’ve also had the opposite of the naked dream: I meet a hot, willing chick in my dream, and am trying to get busy, but my clothes are the full-body version of Bartholomew Cubbins’ hats, and no matter how many layers I take off, there’s always another layer underneath. This is, of course, quite frustrating.

22

Me too. I had a night class in grad school where the final was the only grade, and I only attended class a couple of times. The final turned out to be in a different room and the stupid TA didn’t put a sign up (they did tell everyone repeatedly during the semester, but of course I wasn’t there).

I spent the first hour of a four-hour final wandering the campus until I found it. I still break into a sweat thinking about it.

23

I have the theater dream too, despite the fact that I’ve never actually been in a play. (It is always Shakespeare, though, and always a part that I feel like I should know really well.)

24

I’m in my mid-50s and still dream about forgetting the combination to my locker in Junior High School.

25

My version is always that I just remembered not taking the math requirement for my degree (sometimes undergrad, sometimes one of my graduate degrees) and now I’ve got to pass a math test despite not having taken a math course in thirty years.

26

I’ve been to three universities, but I only have the dream about the first place I went to grad school, Illinois. The dream was always about a math class I was taking that was simple, but the test was in a building on the SE side of the quad, far from where I was in the CS building north of Green (for those who know the campus) and I was running out of time and didn’t know the room number.
I never had it about the other two places I went to school.
Haven’t had it, but I got out of that place >> a while ago.

27

Tonight I’m going to dream that I’ve read this same thread a hundred times before. Honest to god.

28

I’ve never had the college dream, but I have had the “college dream reality”, or something close to it: I had to be woken up by porters at uni during one of my maths exams* in my first year where I was hungoverly lying in bed when I should have been doing the exam and arrived 40 minutes late or something*; I still finished the bleddy thing early so it wasn’t the end of the world.

*and the exam was everything I would have had to show for that part of the course (maths was 1/4 of the course and there were 3 maths exams IIRC, so it was a 1/12 of my first year) we didn’t faff around with papers and all that that you do in the US, it was almost all about these 3 hour exams

**they had a great operation organised, this obviously not being the first time someone was as negligent as me: they had walkie talkies and had a communal jcr bike arranged for me to ride down to the exam hall and stuff, seriously!

29

I just had this dream last night, in fact!

It was a class all about beets (?!), and I had blown it off all term, and had to cram for the final exam in a few short hours. And since the subject was so limited (seriously, beets?) I’d need a lot of in-depth knowledge - I certainly wasn’t going to be able to bullshit my way through it. I’m talking mathematical equations that tell you how much acid/alkali it takes to change the color, with, like, exponents and logarithms and shit.

Not sure what brought this on - I haven’t been feeling particularly unprepared at work.

I’ve had similar dreams before - and I actually did blow off more than one class for an entire term back in college.

30

For me it’s whenever I’m feeling over-booked. Too much responsibility, too little brainpower, and I feel like I’m letting something slide in order to keep my head above water. (I tend to be a little anxious and overworried about my performance at work and school anyway.) They tend to show up right around Thanksgiving and again around the end of April, coinciding with my class finals. Once I’m done with my degree, I have no idea when I’ll get them - probably somewhere around the end of the fiscal year at work, or perhaps right around my annual reviews? I’m sure I’ll keep having them - they’re pretty standard by now.

I’ve had so many variations it’s not funny:

I’ve somehow missed a credit or course area, and have to re-take the whole thing now. Today’s the first day of class, required attendance, and I’m on an unfamiliar campus/high school, and I don’t know the course number/professor/teacher/room number/campus building or I can’t find anyone available to ask.

I’ve managed to skip class the entire semester, and the final is today, and I don’t know where my classroom is.

I’m trying to get to school/class/work, and am constantly delayed by parades or traffic or road construction or my car won’t drive properly (in the most recent one it only drove in reverse, so I looked over my shoulder and just drove in reverse until I found myself walking).

I’m IN class, and come to myself realizing I have no fucking clue what this class is, where the hell I am, and I have an exam sheet laying front of me, and am surrounded by other students working busily. This one is actually kind of funny, as I am quite good at BSing, and usually I shrug and start making shit up while I frantically scramble to remember what the class subject was.

They’re not exactly nightmares - I rarely have true nightmares any more and when I do, they make this sort of thing look like happy relaxing sweet dreams. But these ones are memorable and frustrating, and I usually wake up from them thinking “Ok, I need a massage, stat, and I’m taking a mental health day from work this week.”

31

I’ve had multiple variations of this dream throughout my adult life. It’s generally always during high-stress times. Since I became a professor, it’s shifted a bit from me not remembering to take a class to me not remembering that I’m TEACHING a class that semester.

32

I skipped more than enough classes that at least once a semester I’d dream that I showed up for a random class and it turned out that it was a midterm that I was totally unprepared for. Or that I would show up at a final and no one would be there, because it had been moved to another location and I missed all of the classes where they told people that. So on and so forth. Life would have been so much less stressful if I was 50% less of a screwup at age 20.

33

bolding added

You’d like to think so, but I have NEVER IN MY LIFE skipped a class without an excuse and without doing prepwork before (when possible) and/or afterwards to make up for my absences. Likewise with work - I’m there when I’m supposed to be, and I’m the suckup who’s there when I can be helpful also, even when its inconvenient.

I am that super nerdy responsible scholastic person who gets the award for perfect attendance by accident.

I have “unprepared for school” dreams regularly, and they freak me out, because in *addition *to wondering how the hell I’m supposed to save my bacon at the moment, I’m wondering what the hell happened to me that I can’t remember my class or why I wasn’t there for an entire term. Very very very unsettling to be in a situation that’s so out of character for me.

On the plus side, I’ve never once had one of those naked-in-public dreams, which I consider to be a huge bonus.

34

I have these dreams a lot. I still laugh when I think about the one with the margins. British school exam papers come with wide right and left margins which are for marking. Hence they carry the forcible instruction

So, in the dream everything seems fine. I’m working away and I know the topic when I notice that one of the exam invigilators is standing next to me, staring at the paper. I glance up and see that she is my form tutor, someone I intensely disliked. It is when I look back at the exam I realise the awful truth. I have been writing in the margins and only in the margins.

35

I graduated almost 40 years ago and even into my 50’s I still had the dream once every couple of years. I’ll probably have it again at some point.

As I got older the basic dream got dressed up in different ways. In one version, I was prepared for the final but couldn’t find a parking space. In another version, since I hadn’t been to class all semester, I didn’t know where the test was being given. In another version, it was high school rather than college, and my classmates were kids I actually went to HS with.

36

I’ve had that dream many times, set either in high school or college. When set in college, I’m usually enrolled in a class outside my experience that I thought about taking but never took (e.g., organic chemistry). I’ve blown the class off for half the semester, now it’s mid-term, and I realize there’s no making up lost ground. I think it correlates with putting projects off in real life.

37

I have this one regularly. For some reason, it’s always American Government. If I don’t pass it, they will take away my high school diploma, which means they will take away my undergraduate degree, which means they will take away my Ph.D. and my JD, and I will have to start all over again with all of them. The class is at 8 AM and I can’t manage to get myself out of bed to get to it often enough to pass, either.

In retrospect, I think the reason it’s always my Government class is because I did have an incident in that class where someone in our group had invited a speaker to come talk instead of giving our group oral presentation, then we discovered a day or two before it that being allowed to do that was not a general rule, but only for a previous assignment. She was too embarrassed to call and cancel it, and she was out sick on the day of the presentation, so I ended up in the school office trying to explain to some random lawyer that we did not need her to come lecture the class about credit cards after all. She wanted to yell at the teacher for wasting her time, and I wouldn’t tell her who he was - just cried all over her that it was our fault and she shouldn’t yell at him and I was so sorry until she gave up and went away. Miserable experience, which is probably why I still remember it vividly 25 years later, and why I associate that class with having forgotten something vitally important.

38

I had that dream for the first time recently (out of college for 20 years) and it felt so real that months later I still have a slight sense/question that maybe there was a class that I didn’t finish.

39

I’ve been out of school for almost 20 years (college for 24) and I still have that dream. It’s compounded by me dreaming how all this tuition has been paid and Ihave nothing to show for it. Sometimes at the end I remember that I have already graduated and it’s all OK. The dream doesn’t seem to coincide with any pattern in waking life.

On another note, I realized recently that I haven’t had the “in a room full of toilet stalls and can’t find a usable one” dream in quite a while. I wonder what that means.

40

Beets. That’s adorable!