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.

> 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.

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 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.