Forgive me if this has been asked before, but I was wondering if someone could perhaps enlighten me on something.
Exactly why is it that, despite having recently completed my college education (for now at least), I am now having nightmares, or at least disturbing dreams, about being in school, or being in class? What’s worst is that in my dreams, it’s not even the most recent classes, but classes that I had years ago.
And of course, I’m always missing something I should have.
Shouldn’t I be having these dreams while attending class, not less then a week after graduating?
I don’t think anyone knows for certain why we dream, nor why we dream what we dream. However, as a guess, I’d say that your physiological and neurological state at the time of the dream resembles the particular anxiety you associate with classes, and therefore your brain interprets that state as actually being in class. Without the correcting influence of sense data, the brain superimposes other stressful possibilities onto the situation.
I finished my college ed. 11 years ago and still had dreams and nightmares about not being able to get to the campus, find a parking space, find the classroom, etc. I think it’s all residual tension, just leftovers in the landfill of the mind/subconscious.
(Note: I am no expert in this field, but I think the above is logical.)
Now that I’m a professor, I still have dreams and nightmares similar to the ones above, except that a few details have changed. Now I can’t find the classroom where I’m supposed to teach, or they want me to teach Spanish and I don’t know how, etc.
To continue, this could also explain why we remember so much petty stuff from years back that really has no relevance in our current lives: a scrap of a song you once heard when you were twelve, the name of a kid that you played with for a few hours on the beach and never saw again. Then again…maybe we have to carry around all this stuff because it is part of our total life experience and memory cache.
I think dreams of this type are fairly common. I, and many people that I have talked to over the years, have had the high school dream described in this thread where you’re late for class or you do not know where the class is or you don’t have your homework done. And, fairly often, everyone else in the dream seems that to know exactly where they are going in your dream, except for you.
I’ve also had a similar dream that I have re-enlisted in the Army and am being woke up at 4 AM and wondering why did I rejoin?
Myself, I believe that in school, we encounter new experiences and this “dream” school is a metaphor for something that you are dealing with in your life at the present time that you may not know exactly how to handle.
I think it was Wordsworth who said, “The child is the father of the man.”
All of which make an excellent subject for a SDMB thread.
Like anyone, I’ve dozens of dreams I’d like explained. But my highest priority question relates to a friend/co-worder who is religious but from my own perspective has no scruples in other areas I consider important. He can never remember his dreams. I very much wonder why not.
A couple of times I’ve woke up to go to work on a day off, worried that I’m late. Only lasts a minute or two, then I go back to sleep. But it seem’s very real at the time.
Peace,
mangeorge
Add another tricky factor to this, which is that the OP might actually be trying to resolve a problem that’s quite literally depicted in their dream. For example, fears relating to authority figures, or to testing.
While I’d had some insights from good/neutral dreams, nightmares seem the opposite: my mind isn’t dealing constructively with a challenge/fear, and what is dreampt are not opportunities, but paralyzation, inability to deal with something.
You tend to remember your dreams if you wake up partway through it (your alarm goes off, for example). If it comes to its natural termination before you wake, then it doesn’t register as easily.
Also, ten minutes after, if you’re not actively thinking about events in the dream, you will forget it.
Since you just graduated are you having anxiety about finding a job? Maybe this anxiety is being transferred to a more familiar scenario, school. Combined with the job thing is all the anxiety created about now having to be an adult, like your parents. You are no longer just somebody’s dependent kid. Very frightening. We all swear we are never going to turn into our parents, but beware, the metamorphis has begun. The working world awaits. Or, you could take a backpacking trip to Europe and think about it.
I had a similar experience. During the begining of my summer vaction I had dreams that I was at my final exams again. I had not studied. So sitting there in my desk was very unnerving. Of course I woke up and went “OH NO! I FAILED!” only to realize it was all just a terrible dream.
As far as I can figure I was just dealing with anxieties I had about my exams. Before them I worried about the same things that happened in my dreams. Maybe my subconcious just wanted to show me that even if I was unprepared for my finals, it didn’t mean it was the end of the world. That or it was a bunch of random images that just by chance resembled my anxieties. Whatever.
Perhaps your brain is just trying to get used to not having to think about school anymore. You’ve spent years thinking about tests and classes and homework–and now you don’t have to anymore. However, somewhere in the back of your brain is that niggling thought–shouldn’t I be thinking about school? Am I forgetting something? This manifests itself into your dreams. The same thing happened to me. It eventually went away.
I do still get those dreams occasionally, though. I don’t know what that means. However, there was a significant rash of dreams where I was in high school and had skipped math class all semester and now it was finals week, etc. (I never skipped class in high school, BTW. I did hate math, though.) However, in the last of those dreams, I gained new insight into a former high-school relationship. I had unfinished business, so my brain was dragging me back to high school to take care of it. Perhaps you’ve got some emotional “unfinished business” of your own.