Why am I dreaming I have an exam I didn't study for? | Hacker News Reader

Why am I dreaming I have an exam I didn't study for?

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25 pointsonemoresoop35 comments

I am 36, graduated at 24 and about 2 times per year I have a dream that I realize I had forgotten I enrolled in a class and the final is today. I sit down and have no idea what these questions are and have no time to prepare.

This scenario never happened and yet the dream is not only reoccurring in myself, but apparently it is very widespread across society.

Things like this make me wonder if the Mandela effect truly is just mass misremembering where common themes are 'compacted' in similar ways across wide ranges of people this presenting as incorrect memories experienced broadly in society. Such odd phenomenon

I have had this exact dream scenario too - "you signed up for x course and today is the final worth 60% and you forgot you were signed up". Only twice since I graduated many years ago.

I think was latent exam related stress working it's way through my brain. I always hated the stress of 50% or higher exams in engineering courses and they were common. I never stressed while taking the exam, just the lead up to it.

I don't think it's the mandella effect just your subconscious mind coming up with a worst case scenario of exam stress.

Mine's similar. I enrolled in a class, but never went. It's finals day and I'm determined to take it, but I can't find the classroom. Hours of looking for it.

Yeah, I have that one a lot. When I was an undergraduate in the 1980s (at least) it was common to enroll in more courses than you were really intending to take, go to them all in the first week or two, and then make a decision of which courses to keep and which to drop (which you could do with no penalty early on). The idea that I would forget to drop a course I stopped attending haunted me and still does, nearly forty years later.

Same here. It was a nice time to be a student then though. There was little pressure and I would take math, physics, law, psychology etc and find a mix between what I found interesting (math) and parties (not math). Now I dream that I forgot to drop them, dropped the wrong ones or have to pass them all. I like nightmares and I lucid dream most of the nights, so I don’t mind , but funny more people have that.

Funny, when I was in highschool I never studied and just skipped and smoked weed in woods all of the time; come test days I just showed up and aced most of them. Mostly this is because I went from an advanced pace home charter school system in CA (Horizons) to public school in FL (never had to try).

As a result my "version" of this dream is me wondering the halls of a pastiche of the various high schools I've been to with a cast of all those different friend groups having various types of free range fun and dodging teachers or cops.

I'm going to venture a guess that this is because that was the main "stress memory" I have from back then.

I conjecture that those of us who have taken exams entirely unprepared in the real world benefit from an immunity effect so that we never have to dream about it.

Good news, you'll have those dreams all your life, and they'll get really old by the time you're 50.

I recently had a dream I was back in middle school, as an adult, to take an english test that was nearly 20 years overdue. The teacher giving it probably isn't even alive anymore.

I had some similar dream where something overdue in high-school would invalidate passing the grade and, in turn, like a domino effect would invalidate all my education afterwards. Woke up sweating.

I used to have these frequently, as well as a variant where I was getting lost trying to find my way to class on a very large campus full of detours, and then realizing I wasn't even sure what my class schedule was that day.

But after a while these college based dreams faded. I actually came back to a childhood scenario, walking a newspaper route and suddenly realizing I didn't know which houses I'd already delivered or which ones still needed a paper.

And about midway through my career, most of these got replaced with various logistics challenges in generic international airports and vast hotels or conference/convention centers.

> But after a while these college based dreams faded. I actually came back to a childhood scenario, walking a newspaper route and suddenly realizing I didn't know which houses I'd already delivered or which ones still needed a paper.

That used to actually happen to me, thankfully I don't think I've ever had it as a dream though, not yet anyway.

And this article doesn't say anything about why you are still getting those dreams (occasionally) when you have given all possible exams decades ago?

I think we are like AlphaZero. We play chess (or go) with ourselves, in our dreams. That's how we learn. We create our own Microsoft Flight Simulator and step in it, and "fly". And crash. And crash again. That's why most dreams are quite unpleasant. If you don't crash in the simulation, then the simulation was not all that useful.

PS: If you want to create an AI_Zero that creates its own simulation and plays in it to train itself, go for it. Just come back to Hacker News and tell us about it.

This is the more interesting question, I think. 30+ years later still having dreams about exams for classes I forgot to drop, exams I didn’t study for, etc etc.

Having dreams about upcoming exams seems obvious compared to why a lot of us have dreams years and decades after your college years are over.

I suspect that it's that our brains have associated 'deadline stress' with that time period of our lives, and so to release any such stress it plays it out in dream form.

Oddly enough, I don't get college exam dreams, just (secondary) school exam dreams, and tbh I wasn't that stressed out by my exams at college, so it makes sense.

Unless you're like me and all your dreams are fever dreams

Heck, I graduated high school 28 years ago and occasionally I still got nightmares that I didn't study for the SAT (Baccalauréat) exam. Mathematics doesn't appear as often as language, where's the dread that I have to rote learn some 37 "literary commentaries" of great writer masterpieces and there's like two weeks left till the exam and I haven't even started on them. And math is some second change of variable technique for solving integrals and another 46 similar tricks without which one has no chance of passing the "leetcode" of the day within allotted time and a grade that offers chances to a good job^H^H^Huniversity.

Which is strange since not only I didn't start late but I put a solid and unremitting effort into this since some two years before and passed with high grades both the SAT and the university admission exam.

On a similar vein, I can’t find my locker and when if I do I can’t remember the combination. This stopped at some point around 35.

The other one was I’m on a highway in the backseat of a car, trying to drive it. It’s not going well. Once I left a certain job that one stopped at least.

Same one about the combo here. Almost every person I ask has some variation on that one. Crazy how universal it is in my world, especially since it's usually about something that would have happened 20 or 30 years ago, but never really happened.

I had such dreams regularly for a decade or so after graduating. I’d probably have them even now, but I no longer see any dreams I can remember. I have also never “not studied” for the exam, and graduated with honors. I attribute this to the fact that I grew up in a small town in the ass crack of the world and after somehow getting a spot at a “hard” technical school thought I was an impostor. Indeed I still feel that way even though most of my friends who I thought were worthy did not do nearly as well, either there or IRL afterwards.

This indicates to me that the education system isn’t a healthy environment.

It's probably not great to fill children's lives with almost endless anxiety, especially anxiety stemming from school. Don't we want them to enjoy learning, so that they are motivated, and so they learn to love learning in school and beyond it?

There are alternative models that are more considerate of student happiness, such as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School

Right, but this definitely reinforces the idea in my head that school isn’t about learning, it’s about making people who are compliant little worker bees who never stop working.

The very idea of “homework” should be an affront to anybody’s pro-labor sympathies.