I'm in my 40s. For a good long while, my recurring school dream was that my high school discovered that I didn't actually finish correctly, and because that invalidates my college degrees (in dream logic land), I can't do my job until I go back and finish high school properly.

For some reason in the last six months to a year it has shifted to the idea that I signed up for a full semester's worth of courses, while still trying to work my full time job, and I'm flunking all of them because I keep going to work and never attending the classes or doing the homework.

Either way, coming up on nearly 20 years since I've been in any kind of school and my subconscious is still freaked out about it, one way or another.

By contrast, my subconscious appears to not give a flip about whether I'm doing my paying job correctly. Don't tell my boss.

Wow, seeing so many comments high school/college exam dreams do seem universal. I have had these dreams like forever. To think about high school was almost 25 years ago.

Another theme for me is not able to board on plane. More than missing flight it is about being stuck to places where I do not want to be.

Oof. Same here. Why does this happen all these years later? High school years must have really messed a lot kids up.

It's pretty bad that school elicits such stressful responses from us that we remember and relive them 20 years later.

edit: typo.

I still have regular dreams about not passing high school exams. Worse: in my dreams I have to study to pass for high school exams, and work my day job, and take care of the family at the same time. Because of the commitments outside of studying, in the dream I worry about not being able to study. Then I wake up.

Maybe it is a bit more metaphorical - you just have to learn something.

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 :)

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.

I'm genuinely curious why this dream pattern seems to be quite distributed across many people.

I still regularly have the dream where I realized after graduation that I had missed an entire college class or test (often varies depending on the specific dream), but this then nullifies my graduation and all my subsequent work.

Also over 20 years ago, but still a regular visitor to my dreamscape.

Taking very liberal inspiration from the idea of something like Jungian archetypes, more along the lines of there being attractors in the informational dream-space that create narrative clusters linked to common emotions (such as anxiety), I can imagine of set of emotion-to-dream-narrative mappings that would lead to some of the regularities often seen in distributed recurring dreams:

- losing one's teeth - riding naked in the subway - being late to a class or missing a class/test entirely etc.

Just wondering if there has been any research on this that doesn't try to fall on the old standbys of Jungian archetypes, collective unconscious, and other similar handwaving

My version of that dream has me unsure where the class meets (I have a syllabus but can't decipher it somehow) and not sure if I have the right textbook for the class. I keep trying different classrooms but they all just allow me to enter without a hint of whether I'm in the right one.

I have the same shared trauma response. Really does have me thinking back to my school years and trying to grapple with the two opposing feelings of "that was a lot of fun" and "gosh, why is it still giving me nightmares?"

My version is me running late for an exam and then frantically searching for the exam room the entire time as the clock ticks down.

The wave of relief and euphoria that overcomes me when I wake up is literally spiritual.

Oh my, I'm not the only one! I occasionally have a dream that, at the end of a semester, I'm not going to pass because I forgot about some class! The realization, upon awakening, that I'm not in college anymore is wonderful ;)

>>it is the end of the semester, and I've just discovered I've forgotten about an entire class for most of the semester. Then I wake up.

I used to have this exact same dream for years after graduating from college.

I wish someone had told me about these dreams before I went to school/uni, so I wouldn't have ever slacked off causing me to have these worries in the first place.

If it makes you feel better, they can still happen anyway! yay!

As a student or teacher? I've had exactly this recurring dream, forgetting to teach a class. What a nightmare when they are not ready for the exam.

For some reason this is a reoccurring dream for me as well, and its been a few years since I've taken a class.

I still have those dreams -- except now I know they are going to take away my degree, and thus job.

Had those about high school recently and I'm 35 and in grad school.