It’s the morning of your big exam, and you panic because you have not gone to a single semester class.
Fortunately, it’s just a dream. But why do you always have dreams related to the school of years after obtaining your diploma?
Dr. Alex Dimitriu, psychiatrist and sleep of sleep medicine in Menlo Park, California, says that dreams of feeling unprepared can come from stress in your daily life. But specifically dreaming of not being prepared in school, he says, could be because they are years of training in people’s life.
“For many of us, school is really the first time that we have been feeling that feeling of stressful non-preparation,” he said. “In a situation where your stress as an adult is triggered by work or another scenario, these are very powerful memories of the first experience of the first experiences of being not prepared or late or missing something.”
Dylan Selterman, professor of associate education of psychology at Johns Hopkins University who does research in dreams, says that school dreams tend to be “extremely painful”. Often people dream of missing a whole semester of lessons and realizing that they could fail, not being able to find their class, or to discover that they have a big test for which they are not prepared. It may be, he says, because the school system is itself “very emotionally negative for most people”.
A national survey of high school students revealed that most of them negatively felt the school. Students often feel forced to learn equipment they don’t like or are threatened with punishment if they do not comply, says Selterman. Studies also show that many students do not sleep enough because they wake up early to go to school but stand again late to study.
“The school often involves high constraint and high pressure situations where students are in competition with each other and with a lot of things at stake,” explains Selterman. “When you combine all these factors, the school itself is actually very miserable.”
Another explanation, says Selterman, is that people can remember school according to the time of year. For example, at the end of August and early September can trigger more memories or dreams of the school, because it is at this time that the academic year begins.
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These types of dreams are so common that having them from time to time do not generally do not concern something. But if you have a lot, it could be a sign of another problem, like having too much stress in your life. Dimitriu recommends that people try to resolve this stress either by making a change in their lives to eliminate it, or in search of ways to face it.
Some people may also have strange or stressful dreams because of poor sleep hygiene, says Dimitriu. He recommends that people to sleep and wake up about the same time every day, and to avoid eating big meals or drinking alcohol before sleeping. And he encourages people to plan time to relax before bed.
“The human brain cannot go from 100 miles per hour to zero in 20 minutes,” he says. “I tell all my patients to deactivate technology at 10 years old – no screens, no emails for work, none of that. If you are even Amazon Shopping or Instagram scrolls just before bedtime, it’s too engaging, and that makes your brain buzz a little when your brain really needs to slow down.
“You need a little silence, and that will heal your sleep,” he adds. “It will also cure a lot of anxiety.”
He suggests that people are trying to help treat everything that bothers them, which can also make them more prepared and can be an “antidote” to underline dreams, like the one you forget to introduce yourself for your final.
Stressful dreams are “a reminder to focus on relaxation and a reminder to focus on sleep,” said Dimitriu. “I cannot sufficiently emphasize the importance of sleep.”
