Old School
I’ve never to my recollection dreamed about my teeth falling out, being covered in snakes or getting pregnant.
Those, according to the Sleep Foundation, are the subjects that attract the most monthly internet searches.
Being male presumably has a lot to do with my paucity of pregnancy dreams. I’m not particularly skittish about snakes. And I have no real concerns about my teeth, although I do sometimes wish their crooked contours didn’t suggest a stretch of craggy coastline in, say, the Hebrides.
But then, when I recently came across an Atlantic article from 2022 headlined “Why Adults Still Dream About School,” I thought “Bingo!” That rang the class bell.
The vast majority of my dreams that still linger after I wake revolve around classwork. I’m typically searching in vain for the room in which a course I need to pass in order to graduate is being taught. It’s the end of the semester and suddenly I realize that I have never attended this class. Thus, I’m in a double jam — months behind on my coursework and unable even to locate the instructor on whose mercy I’d best throw myself. These dreams often detour into a labyrinthine administration building, where I seek a copy of my class schedule that might include room numbers. The elusive registrar’s office constitutes an additional circle of Hell.
In a nod to my real-life Achilles heel, it’s always a math or a science credit that I lack.
(True story: In college I enrolled in a purportedly breezy astronomy course — the celestial equivalent of “rocks for jocks” — in order to satisfy my remaining science requirement. I was nevertheless in danger of failing the class when the professor threw me a lifeline. Knowing that I wrote for the school newspaper, he said I could write something for extra credit. So, I wrote a science fiction story. I wish I could remember what it was about, but I can’t and have no copy of it. It presumably involved stars and perhaps life on a distant planet. There might have been time travel. Anyway, I ended up getting a B in the course, so either it was a brilliant piece of fiction or the professor was a super-soft touch. I’d like to believe the former, but the latter squares with my peers’ remembrance of the guy.)
Per Deidre Barrett, a dream researcher at Harvard University, school anxiety is “a really common theme.” Anecdotally, it certainly seems to be, even among people like me who haven’t set foot in an academic classroom in decades. What had led the author of the Atlantic piece to write about school dreams was the fact that she was still experiencing GPA panic more than a decade after having graduated and started her writing career. She wondered why this was happening.
Schoolwork dreams and their kin — auditions gone horribly awry — tend to pop up when we’re anxious about being evaluated by an authority figure, Barrett says. Being back at school may equate to “feeling tested in life” and feeling inadequate in the face of others’ expectations, adds Jane Teresa Anderson, a dream analyst and author of The Dream Handbook.
All that made sense when I was working and facing deadlines, but I’ve been retired since December 2020. My responsibilities on most days are sufficiently minimal — get dressed, apply deodorant, hit the treadmill, run the dishwasher when it’s full, mow the grass when it’s long — that I’m frankly killing it. If there’s a big challenge that I’m failing to meet in my waking life, I’m blissfully unaware of what it is.
Well, it is true I’ve always felt inadequate in any number of ways, so there’s that.
After dreams in which I’ve searched fruitlessly for an elusive classroom and panicked over the looming F on my transcript, I wake up bathed in relief. I’m grateful for my materially comfortable, academically complete and joblessly undemanding existence. Could it be, then, that there’s an evolutionary purpose to these school dreams? Might they serve as happy reminders that youth isn’t all fun and games — that along with the inconveniences, indignities and actuarial grimness of old age comes a certain relief in reaching the other side, of having left behind the vicissitudes of youth?
That was the guess of the Atlantic article’s author. And Barrett, the Harvard dream researcher, says that’s sort of right.
While the time we spend in school is just a fraction of our life cycle, it’s a training ground for developing coping skills that serve us well in later life. When we dream of academic challenges, then, we’re reminded both that we’ve earned laurels but had best not rest on them. There’s always going to be another test of some kind. We heedlessly sleep through it at our own peril.
Thus, school dreams can function as prods. They remind us that while no one truly masters life in all its complexity, the better we prepare ourselves for obstacles the likelier we are to weather them with some success.
Maybe these dreams are evolution’s way keeping me on my toes. But again, for what? So that I can better cope with the inevitable infirmities of old age? So that I can optimally navigate the societal collapse that will follow environmental catastrophe? (Nah, I’ll be toast.) So that I might better survive the zombie apocalypse? (Ditto.)
I’ve been reading other articles about dreams from Scientific American, the Cleveland Clinic and other sources. There seems to be no real consensus about why we dream or what dreams mean, other than a presumption that we’re processing the stuff of our waking life during sleep. There also seems to be general agreement (I imagine I’ll hear from my psychologist reader on this) that anyone who’s ever claimed a definitive understanding of the phenomenon of dreaming, such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, was talking out of his homburg. (As name-checked in this fine hat-referencing Procol Harum song.)
Several pieces I read advised that keeping a dream journal can help you better remember your dreams, and that talking them out with a mental health professional can be beneficial if you’re plagued by bad dreams or nightmares, such as those associated with PTSD.
I might keep a dream journal if I suspected that my dreams hid some Big Truth that might alter the course of human history were I to be able to write it down. But then I think about a recent dream in which I was begging Donald Trump to leave my family out of one of his diatribes, and another in which I was desperately seeking a private place to pee, and I conclude that my dreams don’t host elusive cures to what ails humankind.
Also, I am not plagued by bad dreams to anywhere near the point of debilitation. Although I must say, Trump is manifestly unwelcome and already has shown up at least twice. It’s plenty annoying. But only if I’m forced to dream my way through one of his incoherently nasty two-hour speeches might I upgrade this inconvenience to nightmare status and consider counseling.
A source of constant frustration over the years has been my failure to do in sleep something that the speakers at this week’s Democratic convention have been advising we do in civic life: Dream big.
I’ve spoken with friends, coworkers and associates who fly in their dreams, save people from burning buildings, help solve societal crises. But everything I do in my dreams is mundane or worse. I’m never even having sex with Scarlett Johansson or drinking beer with Barack Obama. When I’m not turning schoolwork into a Kafkaesque experience, I’m too often trying not to wet my pants when the convenience store’s bathroom is locked. What’s that about? Maybe it means that I’ve closed a door to self-improvement that needs opening. On the other hand, perhaps sometimes an aging prostate is just that, even in dreamland.
I read a Psychology Today piece on “3 Ways to Have Better Dreams.” It sounds like a lot of work, having to do with developing “daytime lucid dreaming” techniques and involving acronyms like MILD (Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams) and WBTB (Wake Back to Bed). And anyway, having “better” dreams doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be cooler or more fun. At best I might train myself to find that classroom, or prepare for the final exam, or just use the john in my dream before going out in public.
It’s a hell of a lot easier, it seems to me, simply to wake up without classes to attend and within steps of a bathroom.
Now, should I start having nightmares about going gummy or being covered in snakes, I might reassess my response.
