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Comment by ck45 | Hacker News Reader

This is extremely common, I googled a lot about it some years ago. I have it in two versions, the first one is that I have to repeat a maths course in school, being aware about the age difference with the other students, the other one is missing a course in university and not having graduated. The latter one feels so real that in the beginning I had to remind myself about having been at the graduation ceremony :)

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holy crap, i had the ‘missing a course’ nightmare roughly every 2 months for 2 years after graduating.

I've had variations on this dream several times. I was talking to my father about it, and he still occasionally dreams about this. As a 67 year old, 5 years retired, 40 years after graduating...

This scares me, I don't want to be having these dreams in my 60s, do you know if there any kind of therapy? this is a bit like a mini PTSD

I wonder why it's common? Easiest explanation would be extreme stress/mild trauma from the stress of college...

I'm guessing that it's because (at least at my university), the college class experience is pretty anonymous. No one is taking roll and won't notice if you don't show up. You sit in class as an observer, mostly quiet, almost like a disembodied ghost. The experience is already very dream like and easy to dissociate from. This in addition to the stress of the experience makes it prime dream material.

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