School Dreams

Have you ever experienced dreams of forgotten classes, impossible exams and other examples of school-age anxiety? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the pervasive nature of the school dream. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
You're walking down the hall alone, your shoes squeak against
the hard, seamless flooring. You have a sense of otherworldly dread,
a feeling of looming over a drop so far you
can't see the bottom, but you can't remember why. Where
are you? You can't remember that either. The feeling of

(00:23):
dread is absolutely oppressive. It's weighing you down, as if
to pull your soul into the underworld. But wait that feeling.
It's not dread weighing you down. It's a backpack full
of heavy textbooks. You're in your high school. You're alone
in the hall because you're late for class. That's right now,

(00:44):
you remember you had to go back to high school
because it turns out you never actually finished. There was
an error with the paperwork in the high school office,
and somehow they let you graduate even though you never
took the final exam in your hardest class, Russian calculus.
You have to go back and take the exam, and
if you don't pass, you'll be stuck in high school forever.

(01:07):
Let's see what do we learn in Russian calculus? You
can barely recall some vague cyrillic operating symbols. What was
the division symbol. No time to think about it, you
sprint to the classroom where they're holding the exam. Once
you get there, you remember you're not the only one.
Your next door neighbor Jimmy, who's seventy four years old
and illegally burns trash and a metal drum in his backyard,

(01:30):
he also has to come back and take the Rustcal exam.
Jimmy asks did you study? You did not. And that
coffee shop barista with the Optimus Prime tattoo who you
went on a date with a couple of years ago,
they're here too, except now they're dating your childhood best friend.
And who's administering the exam? That's right, it's your old

(01:51):
rust Cal teacher, Christopher Lambert. Mr Lambert is asking everyone
to take their seats. The panic rushes up from your
gut into your wrote. Is there any way out of this?
Your hand bolts up. Mr Limbert calls on you. He says, yes,
when is it? And the whole class turns to look
at you, scrutinizing, crinkling their noses in pity and disgust

(02:13):
at what they see. Then you realize you're not sitting
at a desk, your pants are down and you're sitting
on a toilet in the middle of the classroom. Why
would they put a toilet here? But no time to
wonder about that. The class is laughing viciously at your shame,
and Christopher Lambert is passing out the exams. You didn't
bring a pencil, Sandra Bullock won't let you borrow one, neither, well,

(02:35):
Ken Griffey Jr. The test is starting. Mr Lambert, yell's
eyes on your own paper. A single tooth falls from
your mouth and lands on page one. Welcome Stuff to
Blow your Mind? A production of I Heart Radios has
Stuff works. Are you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind?

(03:01):
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
obviously you can tell that we are going to be
talking about the one, the only, the high school Horror Dream. Yeah, yeah,
the which is really the worst. I have a lot
of disdain for the high school Dream because and I'll
get into more of it later. But but basically, it's

(03:22):
like when you when you go when you dream, you
can do anything, You can be anything, Like this is
the place where lucid dreaming is possible, where all the
boundaries can dissolve, and all the limitations that you know
in the waking world can just be swept away and
you can ascend into the skies of being of pure
light and energy. Uh. But instead, what does our mind

(03:45):
do when we slumber? So much of the time we
have dreams like this, We you know, dreams that are
just cobbled together out of the mundane garbage of our
lives into a form that does not fill us with
wonder or even even terror. You know, like for a
lot of people, it fills them with terror. It depends
they're sort of like they're sort of like low stress,

(04:05):
low anxiety, high school dreams. But when you read a
lot of people's accounts of these, they're like they wake
up in a cold sweat, they're absolutely petrified. This is
something that I think is worth discussing a little bit
because when you when when you look at the surveys
of what people have dreamt about, and there are different
ways of conducting those surveys, so it's there's gonna be

(04:26):
a fair amount of variety there anyway, and it's a
lot of it's also gonna depend on who you're talking to.
As we've discussed on the on the show before. A
lot of studies like this, especially psychological studies, they're often
conducted with college students in small sample sizes, and that
brings a you know, it brings a lot of limitations
and what kind of life experiences the dreams then are

(04:47):
are ascending from. But but I was looking around a
little bit thinking about Okay, it seems like we're often
not talking about nightmares. There's there's like a variety of
dream that is, you know, filled with anxiety or even
dread without actually really breaking over into this room that
we think of as the domain of nightmares. I guess

(05:08):
that depends on the definition you'd use, because I've always
thought of nightmares as including dreams that are not like, uh,
you know, like immediate physical peril. I mean, there are
violent dreams that people obviously think of as nightmares. Like
one of the most common themes of bad dreams is
being chased by something, right, but they're you know, a
huge number of people's really bad dreams are about like

(05:31):
or about like public embarrassment or about things like having
to go back to school and face some kind of
scrutiny or examination. Yeah, but yet when you look at
the surveys to deal with the content of nightmares. We
don't often see, you know, a real definite place for
the school dream. For instance, UH in the nineteen thirty
psychologist Wholesye case and conducted a survey of nightmares and

(05:54):
found their contents to be UH like dealing with animals,
him being chased, death and murder at twenty and then
it goes down to like two percent home and family falling,
and then miscellaneous nineteen percent, accidents seventeen percent. And you
see similar things with other surveys. There's a Harvard psychologists

(06:16):
Didra Barrett's survey and it UH said like being chased
with seventy two percent death of family members in for
sixty percent. Following UH, monsters and or animals made it
on their thirty three percent war, violent crimes, natural disaster.
And there there have been others that kind of match this,

(06:37):
this sort of thing, you know, it's like physical harm,
physical danger. UM. I did find a two thousand uh
inten German study from the Central Institute of Mental Health
and Mannheim, Germany that said nightmares okay, forty falling, being chased,
feeling paralyzed, but also twenty four percent being late to

(06:59):
an import an event, which definitely lines up with a
lot of what we're talking about here, because so often
the content is I am I'm late to the exam
right um, or I have I've let time slip away
in advance of the exam. So yeah, it is going
to come back to like how do we classify nightmares?
And what do we think of when we think of nightmares?

(07:21):
And then after we've had one of these school dreams,
how we classify it. But I think there's a strong
case to be made that that what we're talking about
here isn't a nightmare, and yet at the same time,
I myself find myself at times wishing it were, because
at least if it were a nightmare, it would it
would feel more more potent, you know, it would feel

(07:41):
like it's maybe doing something that it's cathartic in a
way that matters, instead of being this just ridiculous rehearsal
for a thing that is that is not going to occur.
You know. Well, this brings us back to a question,
of course we're gonna have to touch on throughout the
episode today, and unfortunately we're not gonna be able to
answer in a definitive way, But like, what is the
purpose of the content of dreams if anything to begin with,

(08:05):
I mean do that we know that like sleep and
dreaming are obviously important for some kind of neurological function,
but we don't know if the contents of dreams are important,
and we don't know if they are important, why are
they important? What do they do? Right? And and yeah,
once you you can sort of divide into two schools
of thought where it's either the contents of the dreams

(08:26):
do matter or they don't um and when you get
into the various arguments for them actually mattering, and then
you get into various divisions. On the show, we've discussed
the writings of Frederick van Eden in the past, who
wrote Study of Dreams, and this was a book that
outlined lucid dreaming, for instance, but you know he covered

(08:48):
everything from you know, ordinary dreams to symbolic dreams, demon
dreams and more so. Yeah, it depends on it depends
on which view you're taking. Either the content manners or
it doesn't. And then if it if it does matter.
There's so many ways to unpack that. But I would say, actually,
whether the content of dreams matters or not, like whether

(09:08):
what you dream about actually has adaptive value in life
or whether it's just sort of like a byproduct of
something going on in the brain. And you know, what
happens in a dream has no effect on life or
no positive effects, either way you split it. It's an
interesting question to ask, why do we dream about the
things that we dream about? Like why is that the content,

(09:29):
whether it's adaptive or not. Well, it comes back to
the nightmare thing, Like so much of the time, I
feel like the school. You know, sometimes we we do
have dramatic events in our school history, but a lot
of times we don't. And yet that's the stuff that
still remains like so potent to us in our dreams.
And I think that can be the irritating thing, Like

(09:50):
why am I still dreaming about this thing? This thing
is solved high school, you know is solved. You know,
it's i've I've I've been out of it for you know, decades.
Why I still returned to it in dream? What is
it about that experience or that time in my life?
Maybe the plasticity of my mind that that makes that
the the the the the fabric of my dreams. Yeah,

(10:13):
so I want to talk about a few common variations
I think just from what I've read anecdotally. I've not
been able to find a rigorous study characterizing the nature
of school anxiety dreams, but I have found some informal
collections of anecdotes and based on that, and I have
to say some very common dreams are, uh, I have
to go back to high school and finish a class

(10:34):
or a test that I never finished and I don't
know in like, there's the knowledge that I am an adult,
but I have to go back and do this. Yes,
I've definitely done that one. I've I've definitely had that one,
and I've done that one to a certain extent because
I went back after college and taught high school at
the high school that I attended. Wow, so I kind
of had this weird like I was kind of living

(10:55):
the dream the worst way possible. And so I will
sometime have dreams that are I'm sometimes a little vague
as to whether I am dreaming about teaching high school
and my old high school where I'm dreaming about attending
the high school, or having to go back and take
a class that I didn't finish, that sort of thing.
What age were you when you were teaching at that
high school? I mean, I was fresh out of college.

(11:17):
So I was, oh, yeah, so that might come back
later when we talk about different periods of life in
the formation of memories, that that might be relevant to
your case here. Um. So another thing that is extremely common.
In fact, just before we started off, we were talking
to our producer today, Seth, and he was saying that

(11:37):
he's had this dream. I've had this dream. I've talked
to tons of people who have had this dream, who
have been out of school for decades, and it's this.
It's the end of the semester. There's a class that
I forgot I was enrolled in and I haven't been
going to and now I suddenly remember, oh no, I'm
in this class and I've got to go take the
final exam. Yeah. I I have done that one as well,

(11:58):
where I'm I missed the deadline to drop the class, uh,
and or just forgot that I had it entirely. And
and it'll like summon like a mental calendar of when
your classes are, and it's generally usually something like, oh,
it was a Wednesday morning class and it was it
was sandwich between two other classes, and somehow I just
missed it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get the exact same

(12:19):
calendar effect. Actually, I think about like, oh, I wasn't
going because I was doing this other thing at this
time of the week, and I just forgot repeatedly that
I had this class. Now I suddenly remember, and uh,
and my chicken is cooked. I mean, they're like, there's
no way I'm going to pass this exam. Other common
things that I found reported are difficulty with navigating the

(12:41):
school environment, so being in high school or being in
college and being unable to find the classroom so you're
like running around, you're late for the class and you're
trying to get there, but you can't find the door
or you can't get in. I've never had that one. Yeah,
It's it's weird how you know that our experiences will
will vary like that one. I've never had, Like I've

(13:02):
never had a problem getting to the dream classroom and
a dream. Another big one I think is school based embarrassment,
dreaming about like being embarrassed in front of a classroom
or in front of classmates, or like having to give
a presentation in front of a class and not being
prepared or being embarrassed some way. See I I the

(13:23):
weird thing is I don't have any of those related
to actual class experiences. But but since I was in
um theater, I do have dreams related to productions that
I haven't learned my lines. Yes, I have the same
dreams I did theater in high school. And yeah, I
I very frequently dreamed that I suddenly remember, oh, yeah,

(13:44):
I'm in a play that's opening tonight and I haven't
looked at my lines yet. How about this one? This
is a weirder one, but I feel like I hear
this one pretty often, sort of blending of school with
the workplace or with the current friend group, and blending
of like old teachers with bosses. You get this, No, No,
I don't really get that one. I would get get

(14:05):
the blending of workplaces to a certain extent, because I'll
have dreams where I didn't actually fully quit my previous job.
I'm kind of like kept one foot in it somehow,
but I have to keep going back to do like
the bare minimum to still be a part of the
previous employers. And and I always just kind of analyze

(14:26):
that as being like, it's about fear of change. It's
about fear of like entering any kind of new phase
in life. This dream rehearsal in which I never actually
leave any step behind, you know, where I'm managing to keep,
you know, one foot on every stone that traverses the
pond or the stream. I can absolutely see that. Yeah,

(14:46):
general dreams about not just school, but school being one
example of like being drawn back into a previous stage
of life, like you can't you can't move on to
the next thing. Yeah, yeah, all right, Well maybe we
should take a break and then when we come back
weekend analyze the school dream a little more than alright,
we're back. So, you know, in our cold open you

(15:07):
added the bit about tooth falling out and seth our producer.
He he mentioned that he has had dreams in which
is his teeth fall out in the school anxiety dream.
I've never had a dream where or teeth fall out,
which which is is weird because I mean, like dental
anxiety has was. It was kind of part of my
upbringing because you know, my father was a dentist. You know,

(15:30):
I remember like seeing slides of awful teeth when I
was a kid, and and even today like I'll you know,
i'll you know, I you know, I'm I'm I'm getting older.
I think about my my dental health and I and
I regularly read articles that are discussing correlation between dental
hygiene situations and say things like Alzheimer's. So, I mean,

(15:53):
there's plenty of of of fuel there for the fire,
and yet that never happens in my dames. That's interesting. Now,
of course, the teeth falling out dream goes way back,
and you've got all kinds of like Freudy intakes on
that and stuff where it's you know, it's metaphorical for
some kind of like wish or anxiety that you have.

(16:13):
Weather dreams are actually metaphorical in those ways, I think
is an unsettled question. But but but it's certainly they
could be. And if they are, yeah, it could be
that maybe you don't really suffer from the underlying anxiety
that drives whatever causes people to think about their teeth
falling out in dreams. Maybe the teeth falling out in
dreams is not normally about teeth. That that's if the

(16:35):
like metaphor theory of dreams is true, which we don't
know if it is. And my hand has fallen off
in a dream before, but yeah, never the teeth. Well,
so back to the school dream, we know, at least
anecdotally just from talking to people, that it seems pretty
common for adults who have been out of school for
a long time to keep having these recurring dreams about school.

(16:56):
Uh even you know, I've I've talked to people who
are in their sixties who still have these dreams, which
is not I'm not looking forward to that for the
rest of my life. But oh well, uh, and so
the question is like, is it really all that common? Again?
We are going to be dealing here with the problems
that are common to all kinds of psychological studies, which
is often there is not enough data about say, the

(17:18):
entire world, and you know, we get like the weird focus, right, yes,
weird science, but not in the fun way of weird
standing for Western educated and from industrialized, rich and democratic countries,
just meaning that like in lots of studies, especially lots
of psychological studies, there is a disproportionate representation of people

(17:39):
in that sort of category a lot of times because
these studies are done at like western research universities, and
that brings up the potential criticism. Well, of course, all
these people were having dreams about exams and exam anxiety.
They are college students. Right, there's not any mystery at
all why college students would be dreaming about uh school
and college and exams. And of course these find that yes,

(18:00):
college students do dream about that a lot. Just one example,
a two thousand three study in the journal Dreaming found
among Canadian university students that dreams about the category known
as school teachers and studying where the fourth most common
typical theme of dreams out of a list of like
fifty something common themes of dreams. But they're Canadian college students.

(18:21):
That just doesn't seem very surprising at all. But studies
including like older populations have also found that school dreams
remain very common. Just to cite one example from the
journal Dreaming in by Mathis Shreddle and Goritz called frequency
of typical dream themes in most Recent dreams and online study.

(18:42):
They had a big sample collected online. It was two thousand,
eight hundred and fifty three participants. They did a survey
about the themes of recent dreams people had, and this
was based on a common dream theme inventory that has
like a list of commonly cited themes and you can
check off which ones applied to you in recent dreams uh,
And they said that the findings were mostly consistent with

(19:05):
other studies showing prevalence of dream themes in different populations.
They ended up ranking dream themes by prevalence, and dreams
about school teachers and studying was actually the fifth most
common category of dreams by theme. Overall. I found that
the entire list of ten was kind of interesting. Yeah, well,
I mean six is arriving too late, which could be

(19:25):
very very well be couched in the same area, right,
and then if you have a dream that you know
more than one applies to, you can check both. Right,
So let's do the whole list. Number ten swimming, number
nine being physically attacked, Number eight, a person now alive
being dead. Number seven a person now dead being alive,
Number six arriving too late, number five school teachers and studying,

(19:49):
number four, sexual experiences, number three being chased or pursued.
Number two. Oh, this one hits home trying something again
and again. And then number one flying or soaring through
the air. See you know this list just it almost
just makes me enraged, because like people are people are
having flying dreams? Is their number one? Lots of people

(20:10):
have flying dreams. I do not have I've had like
to flying dreams I can remember i've and then the
sexual experiences. I've rarely have a sexual dream, and now
I should have. I should add the caveat here that
I remember. Big aspect of dreaming is you know, to
what extent are we able to then recall what we
have dreamt of when we wake up? I hate that.

(20:33):
The thing I definitely identify with most on here is
trying something again and again, like the dream about how
you just need to do something that should be really
simple and you should be able to do it, but
you try and you try and you try and you
can't and it just doesn't work. Yeah, or like like
one of my most recent dreams I will share with
everyone is that that I was trying to move a

(20:55):
horse across um uh you know, like from one city
to another in a horse train there, and Glenn Danzig
was helping me, or he was supposed to help me,
but he was absolutely no help at all, and it
was super frustrating and I kept having to to reattach
the horse hitch um, which is or the hitch on
the trailer with the trailer hitch which was you know,

(21:16):
which was extra frustrating because like nothing in this dream
had anything to do with what with with like actual
real life struggles, like I'm not dealing with horses or
horse trailers. Yeah, well that's that's interesting stuff again because
sort of like the school dream, Now it's not relevant
to your life at this moment. So what's going on.

(21:37):
Is it a metaphor for something that is relevant to
your life in this moment or is it just a
sort of like thought pattern or memory patterns being retrieved
for no good reason. And and I guess the perplexing
thing and about anything like this is that since we
we have this fan, this fantastic ability to to make
connections and things and even like random assemblages, you know,

(22:00):
we can come up with the story if we if
we analyze it enough, we can say like, oh, yeah,
well this is like clearly the horse represents this, and
the trailer represents this, and Glenn dansit represents that. You know,
you can come up with a version of it that
makes sense. But then does that have anything to do
at all with the the origin of the dream exactly?
I mean that might be a personally useful story to

(22:20):
come up with. I can see how it can be
useful for for people to interpret their dreams, even if
the interpretation they come up with actually has nothing to
do with the cause of those thoughts arising in their
head while they're sleeping. But I do agree this is
I joke about it being enraging, but it is a
very interesting list. Yeah, it's like swimming dreams. Swimming is
on here. I never, I rarely have ever had a

(22:41):
swimming dream. Don't I swim, you know, every morning if
I can. Uh? And yet it doesn't really factor into
my dreams at all. But okay, to mention it again.
Back to our our subject. This theme, known as school
teachers and studyings number five the fifth most common theme
of dreams uh in people responding to this massive online survey.
But simply checking a box that says a recent dream

(23:04):
included themes of school teachers are studying doesn't really tell
you all that much, right, Like it would be useful
to have more granular detail. What exactly usually happens in
the most common school based dreams? What level of school
does it apply to? Are the dreams good or bad?
I imagine they're probably mostly bad, but I don't know.
I've got, you know, hunches. But has anybody actually looked

(23:25):
into this, and so the answer is I was not
able to find a rigorous study characterizing the school dreams
like this, but I did find at least one informal
survey of of these dream experiences, so to look at that.
I was reading a blog post about this on Psychology
Today by the Boston College research psychologist Peter Gray, and

(23:46):
he had obviously noticed the same trend about adults having
school dreams long after they leave school or graduate. And
by the way, the post had a great deadpan title
that does give away the findings, but it's worth reading.
It is the dream of school and none of the
dreams are good. Yeah, I mean I can I certainly
can't think of a good school dream that I've ever had.

(24:06):
They've all been at the very least boring and tedious,
if not, you know, anxious. Yeah. So Gray used his
online platform to conduct an informal survey about the nature
of school dreams and their emotional valence. Uh. Now, remember again,
this is an informal survey, not scientific data, so there's
no attempt to randomize participation or blind respondents about the

(24:27):
purpose of the inquiry, so there could be selection effects
biasing the responses here, but with that strong caveat in mind,
what you know if it's a starting place. What did
he find in this survey? Well, first of all, he
looked into what was the level of school that people
dreamed about. By far, the most common was high school.
Seventy three percent of dreams involved high school. Uh. And
these responses are going to add up to more than

(24:49):
because people can report dreaming about more than one level
of school. But like high school seventy college thirty percent,
elementary school twelve percent, middle school seven percent. Where the
dreams good or bad? As alluded to in the title,
the dreams were overwhelmingly bad on a one to five scale,
with one being very pleasant and five being very unpleasant.

(25:09):
Nobody rated any recurring school dream better than a three.
Almost all dreams were rated a four or five. Common
emotions identified by the dreamers in these dreams include anxiety, panic, shame, embarrassment,
and helplessness. It sounds about right. He found that the
dreams continued for decades after people graduated from school, and

(25:30):
they were extremely common in people in their thirties and forties,
but much older people still reported them. Uh. And back
to the question of like, what are these dreams like
what actually happens in them. Plenty of things happened, but
he found the two most common among the people who
replied to his survey were missing classes all term and
therefore being likely to fail. This seems like it goes
right along with this. You know, this archetype we talked

(25:52):
about at the beginning, and then second being unable to
find the classroom. This is the one you were less
familiar with, right, Robert, Yeah, I don't think I've had
this one, but it totally makes sense. I mean, I
mean I remember from real life at times having that issue,
like trying to find a classroom or trying to find
where the classroom is moved temporarily. I mean, it seems

(26:13):
like the kind of thing I would have dreamt about
but I did not. Well. Another interesting thing that I've
found when people collect these anecdotes of people's school anxiety
dreams is that they're not only common among people who
struggled in school or actually experienced feelings of helplessness and classes.
It seems they're very common at least also maybe even
more so among people who were successful as students and

(26:35):
who did well in their classes. Yeah, I mean, you
just because you're good at something doesn't mean you're you're
stress free about it, right, right? But I guess now
we've got to turn to the question of why why
these school dreams? For decades after people leave school, you
might be in your fifties, you might be in your sixties,
and you're still having the dream where you forgot you
were enrolled in Russian calculus and you've got to show

(26:56):
up and take the exam. Why does that happen? Why
does that take hold of our brains? Why are we
not instead replacing those dreams with dreams about things that
are affecting us in the present. I think it's he
has a great question, and my my sort of gut
answers it would be that we live very boring lives,
you know, Like, like I I legitimately want I did
a little looking around for this, and I couldn't find

(27:17):
a good source. But my my immediate question is, like,
how would this kind of data match up with people
who instead of going to college, uh, like we're we're
drafted into the military. Like what would this data look like,
say from you know, more from like a World War
two era, um, you know, a group of subjects. I

(27:37):
was really curious about that too. And like, as we said,
you know, the data we have seemed to be affected
by like the selection problems that exist in a lot
of current psychological literature. But yeah, if there is data
like that out there somewhere and somebody knows about it,
please send it our way. I would love to see that,
to see if that's different. Likewise, this would be a
great area to hear from just our listeners, Like what

(27:59):
has you what's your experien as if you especially if
you didn't if if you were, say drafted into the
military or join the military, like right after high school,
Like what do you have more of Do you have
more like boot camp dreams or military dreams or even
combat dreams, or do you have more high school dreams?
Like I wonder, wonder like what has the most potency?
I mean, I wonder also our school dreams common among people,

(28:21):
say who didn't go to high school. Maybe if you
only have an elementary school education and you know you
went on straight to a career after that, do you
still have anxiety dreams about elementary school right? Or do
you have dreams about like the trials that take place
at that high school age stage of your life? Like
entering the workforce or you know, whatever happened to you know,

(28:42):
fill those years. Yeah, I wish we had more information
about that, but that's a very interesting question. All right.
On that note, we're going to take a quick break,
but we'll be right back. All right, we're back. So
in trying to answer this question of like why school
anxiety dreams seem to be so calm and among people
who went to high school or college but have been

(29:03):
long out of it, you know, like the high school
is not something that's still a pressing concern for them,
and yet they have nightmares about it, or at least
anxiety dreams about it frequently. Yeah, Like you can forget
everybody's name that you went to high school with, but
he still these dreams. I was reading an article by
the science writer Stephanie Poppas about this and and she

(29:24):
led me to some interesting thoughts that I don't think
I would have connected to automatically, but this was this
was cool. So so she's looking at the same question,
and one idea she brings up that I thought was
a very interesting possibility is an association with what's known
as the reminiscence bump. Robert, were you familiar with this. Okay,
I wasn't either, but um, but it makes sense based

(29:44):
on some other things I've read. So the reminiscence bump
is the tendency for people to have better recollection of
stuff that happened when they were in their late teenage years,
in their early twenties, and better recollection of that stuff
than any other point in their law fives. So, for example,
older adults, you take somebody maybe in their fifties or
sixties or seventies, they will seem to have greater access

(30:07):
to more vivid memories with more accuracy at the referring
to things that happened at the time there were maybe
sixteen to twenty five, and less access to memories with
less accuracy dealing with things both before and after this.
And many studies have demonstrated the reminiscence bump. I think
this is a well established phenomenon. Well I could see

(30:29):
that being a you know, a direct factor in its
then for sure, Yeah, it's possible. So we'll continue to
think about this. But to look a little bit more
closely at the reminiscence bump, if you want to imagine
basically the quality or salience of memories throughout the life.
In general. Uh, the quality and quantity of autobiographical memories
is is not equal across time, and there's sort of

(30:49):
an s curve in lifetime memory retrieval. For example, adults
tend to remember very little from before the age of
five or so. This is sometimes referred to as childhood amnesia.
Memories increase from here and you get this curve going
up where the older you get, the more memories you
have from that period, and it peaks sometime around the
early twenties, like late teens, early twenties. That's that's the

(31:12):
golden time for having the most memories that are most
easily retrieved. And that it's also a reason perhaps that
you like so much of the nostalgia that is marketed
at you is going to be marketed at things from
that period of your life. Oh yeah, actually, uh now
I don't remember who made this point, but somebody I
was reading made this point. I'm sorry I can't remember
the name. Pointed out that the connection between this and

(31:34):
the cycle of remakes and films, that there seems to
be about a twenty year lag and that would tie
in with like the stuff you remember coming out when
you were twenty years old, you being ripe to like
go engage in nostalgia for that or even participate in
making the remake when you're forty interesting Okay, But anyway,
after this increase in in the retrieval of memories from

(31:55):
around the early twenties, they your your ability to retrieve
memories decline again from later periods, so older adults remember
less from their thirties and forties. Though, of course, no
matter what age we are, we tend to recall recent
events better, So whatever wherever you are in the age range,
the memory of course from the last few years will
usually be pretty good. So no matter what your age is,

(32:17):
if you're after you know, thirties or forties, you're going
to have kind of an s curve with it peaking
up again for more recent things. So we can definitely
see how this could be related. It could be relevant
to the lifelong power of school related terror and it
seems to line up especially with the observation that the
majority of school related dreams are not about like elementary school,

(32:39):
but they tend to be about high school and college.
So that could be because school anxieties are common for
people who attend high school and college in their late
teens and early twenties, and these themes are especially salient
and easy to access in memory for dream content. But
I guess this forces us to ask the question, if
the reminiscence bump plays a role in the prevalence of

(33:00):
school related dreams, why do we have a reminiscence bump
in the first place, Like why would we remember this
part of our lives better than other parts of our lives.
And there have been a lot of hypotheses to explain
this pattern. I think it's something that it's you know,
it's not fully answered yet, but there's a lot of
research and thought about this. An early idea was that
maybe this is just the time of life when like

(33:21):
the brain is physically most adept, it's you know, your brain,
is it optimized, high potential, it's making memories best than
those those memories are easiest to retrieve later. Well. One
one possibility that I think ties directly in with this,
that you know, I'll come back to later on, is
that this is a time period this is the teenage brain.
And uh, we've talked about the teenage brain on the

(33:42):
show in the past, about how it is it is
wired a little differently, like the different there are different
priorities for the teenage brain, for instance, with making social connections.
Uh and you know, from an evolutionary standpoint, like that
is there because you would need to make connections with
new people, you would need to branch out and uh
and and become a part of other groups and it

(34:05):
would be necessary for your survival. So like the teenage
brain is is wired for this passage into a new
phase of life. Uh So, yeah, that could be part
of it for sure. Well, I want to come back
to that in a second, because who's the Who's the
personality that you need most importantly to make a connection
to for social relevance. It's yourself, right, that's like identity

(34:26):
formation period. So so we'll come back to that in
a minute. Uh. There's another explanation that seems to have
gained some credence after the initial thing about maybe the
brain just being good at making memories. Then, um, it
has to do with the nature of life in late
teens in early twenties. Maybe we remember this period best
because for many of us, this is the period when
life is filled with the most variety and novelty. Remember

(34:49):
when we talked about the sort of the psychological dilation
of time. Experiences that feel like they're taking the longest
actually take up the shortest time time in our memory,
and they sort of collapse because these are the mundane, boring,
grinding experiences. An hour waiting in line for something feels
like it takes forever, but it takes up almost no

(35:10):
space in your later memory. Meanwhile, a novel experience that
you've never done before, it's very strange and challenging to you,
goes by in an instant in the moment, but then
in your memory it takes up this expansive character. And
thus the faster your time seems to go by in
the present, the more time you seem to have had

(35:31):
to experience life in your memory. Yeah to the prime
examples of this are frequently, of course, a vacation, and
ultimately that's one of the great things about of a vacation,
because you've you've changed the way you're interacting with novelty
in your life. Uh. The darker example, though, it would
of course be a traumatic occurrence, where it is it
is also impacting your life in a novel way. But

(35:54):
in both cases, those can be things that where it
just seems like time is super sped up in the moment,
like the things are just rushing, asked you, and then
it's over. But then when you think back that time
is way stretched out. It represents more life than the
you know, the week before that, where there was there
was just a mundane work week. Yeah. Another example of
this is frequently a one's wedding. If you've had a

(36:15):
wedding ceremony, like it's it's it's really become kind of
a trope, right that it will it will just fly by.
You'll barely have a chance to experience it in the moment,
but of course it will be this thing that you
think back to, uh, you know, for the rest of
your life. Right, And this does seem to go along
with some psychology and neuroscience. It's well known that the
brain essentially encodes stronger memories of novel experiences than of

(36:38):
routine ones. You're gonna have a weaker memory of things
that you've done a million times and just happened to
do again the other day, then of something that was
really unusual and new for you. Just for example, I
was reading an article about the reminiscence bump by Katie
Waldman and Slade and She pointed out that there was
a nineteen eight study that found that nine percent of

(37:00):
vivid life memories concern unique or first time events. That's
a lot. Yeah, I mean that would make sense. I
mean just if you look at memories just to sheer
like cataloging of events or occurrences that may prove useful later,
like the ones that are gonna be highlighted, or this
would never happen before, Well, we better we better mark
this one. We better make sure this one's nice and vivid,

(37:20):
because this will this could be useful if this thing
were to happen again exactly. But this theory has some
challenges to explain. The reminiscence bump, for example, a big
problem a lot of the memories that people report experiencing
through their reminiscence bumps. So you ask somebody to say, okay,
you know, what are the things you you know remember
in your life and make a list of autobiographical details.

(37:40):
A lot of them are gonna be in their say,
early twenties or late teens or something. But a lot
of these experiences are not, in fact novel experiences. They'll
remember something mundane from that time period. Well like when
I think back to high school. I don't think I
have any definitive memories of specific tests that I was

(38:02):
stressed out about. You know. It's it's like these these
dreams seem to be occurring from just a generalization of
of of anxiety that I was feeling at the time. Yeah,
and so Waltman's article points actually to something that I
found really interesting. And this comes back to the point
you were making earlier that we're both talking about earlier.
Another theory that's become popular and gained some traction in

(38:24):
explaining the reminiscence bump is that the reminiscence bump occurs
in the late teens, in early twenties or its peaks then,
because this is a time full of memories that people
come to see as self defining. These are autobiographical, narrative
experiences that come to mind when we're asked to think
about our identity, who we are, and so experiences and

(38:46):
and studies have shown this experiences that we see as
self defining occupy a privileged place in our memory, even
if they occur at other stages of life. But apparently
it's just very common for self defining experiences to be
clustered in your late teenage years and in your twenties.
Does that make sense? Yeah? Absolutely, yeah, I mean this

(39:06):
was this is this this time of of expansion in
our life, this time of stepping from one one stone
across the stream to another. Yeah. And so normally when
we think about self defining memories, we want to drift
towards the positive, right, And so if you are asked
to make a list of like I am statements about yourself,

(39:27):
so you know, make list ten statements about you saying
like I am this, I am that, And then after that,
I say, take every one of those I am statements
and make a list of specific autobiographical memories you have
that that that illustrate this fact about you that you
are this thing. People will tend to make lists of

(39:47):
a lot of things from their like teenage in early
twenties period. But studies find that that people can have
un if people have self defining experience at other periods
in their life, they will remember these other periods in
their life very well also. Uh So, so it could
just be that there's this unfortunate like timeline coincidence, coincide, coincidence,

(40:11):
coincidence that the timeline of when you're in high school
and when you're in college. Happens to line up pretty
well with the timeline of when you're figuring out who
you are and making memories that will last the rest
of your life to help you make sense of your
life and your in your narrative arc. Absolutely, yeah, I
think those two line up, you know, rather nicely now.

(40:32):
But then again, uh. In that article I was talking
about by Stephanie Poppas, she also interviews Michael Shreddle, who's
in charge of the sleep Laboratory at Central Institute of
Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany. Yeah, he's the same author
of that and the nightmare survey that referred to earlier. Yeah,
and one of the studies I referred to earlier survey.
And Shreddle does not agree with the reminiscence bump theory.

(40:55):
He he thinks that dreams stem from the brain trying
to deal with problems it's facing in the present, perhaps
by way of analogy, and and he tells her quote
the examination, dreams are triggered by current life situations that
have similar emotional qualities. And I mean, obviously, you know
he's the expert on this. I'm not, but I have

(41:17):
some issues with that because if this is true, I
feel like, in a way, it still doesn't answer the question. Like,
let's say that all school anxiety dreams are actually functioning
on a kind of unconscious system of metaphors. It's the
brain working over current problems and obstacles by presenting a
strange metaphorical scenario that has similar emotional qualities. We don't

(41:39):
know that's the case, but let's assume that's the case. Yeah, Like,
for instance, you're not looking for a classroom in which
you have to take an exam, but perhaps you're looking
for something. Perhaps you're not concerned about failing a test,
perhaps like you're concerned about being judged in one fashion
or another. Exactly right, Yes, So if that's the case,
the question remains, why is school so prevalent as the

(42:01):
metaphor that the brain chooses even later in life? If
for some reason it must default to a metaphor, why
not one from more recent experience. Why aren't all the
fifty year old's anxiety dreams about school or replaced with
dreams about other anxiety inducing situations from the past month
or the past year of their life? Why go back

(42:22):
to this time? So I feel like that that could
be true, but it wouldn't necessarily answer the question of
why school in the dreams? Now is? I believe we
mentioned earlier that dream anxiety dreams about exams in school.
You know, we've mostly been dealing about them after the fact,
you know, five, ten, twenty forty years later. But the

(42:43):
reality is that we also see these dreams occurring, you know,
in real time before the tests occur, being experienced by
actual students. Yeah, and that that's the time when it
totally makes sense. It's more just the mystery of why
they occur later in life. But maybe by understanding what
role they serve in the moment, you could better understand
why they linger in the brain so much. Right. So, yeah,

(43:04):
this bring brings us to this this broader question, right,
could could anxiety dreams actually be adaptive? Are they helping
us in one way or another? Are the contents of
them helping us in some way? Right? And and this
again we come back to sort of the division about
dreams and how they work. Does the content matter at all?
Or or or the contents of the dreams sort of
like the scap that has been extruded by by the

(43:26):
like the psychic digestive system of the sleeping mind. Uh. Anyway,
and this we end up, you know, coming back, yeah
to those big questions. I'm reminded of an interview that
we conducted with the Dr marn Surf years ago on
our episode. I believe it was the one about the
nine dream Worlds of Frederick penn Eden. And you know,
you talked about there being five different theories out there,

(43:49):
predominant theories about dreams that range from importance about dream
content that range from importance to non importance, you know,
ranging from it like it's like a defragmentation of the
hard drive, you know, a race and key memories assorting
dreams as emergent narrative another one. Um. And other extreme
examples include, you know, the idea that our our brain
is looking at things that we suppressed during the day,

(44:11):
or that the brain is using the dream to simulate
futures for us so that we can act better in
the waking world and um and yeah, so we're looking
around them. There are some interesting cases to be made
regarding these anxiety dreams as being perhaps even being simulations
for something that's coming, at least dealing with stress ahead
of an event. And uh so, one of the papers

(44:33):
that looked at here was will students pass a competitive
exam that they failed in their dreams? This was published
in in Consciousness and Cognition was by Arnold at All
So the authors point out that most students in medical
school dream about an exam before the exam, and they

(44:54):
primarily dream of failure, being late, not being able to
answer the questions on the exam, et cetera. And yet,
unlike you know, with typical anxiety, dreaming of an exam
seems to predict higher performance on the exam. So their
theory was that it's like your dramaticization of high concerns

(45:15):
during the dreams maybe training the brain for the challenges
to come, so kind of like let's just hit him
with a bunch of like the brain is just hitting
you with a bunch of worst case scenarios so that
you'll be like better emotionally prepared for something more middle
of the road. That's really interesting. I mean I do
wonder if that's true, Like just mechanically, how does it work,

(45:37):
you know, literally, how does it increase the brain's ability
to actually deal with the test, to have the dream
about it. Yeah, it also sounds like like maybe you know,
we don't want to personify the brain. The sleeping brain
is being like a you know, a team of little
bitty scientists that are deciding how they're gonna what they're
gonna roll out, what kind of programming is presented. Is

(45:58):
with because it also seems like, well, okay, if we
could go back to the idea that dreams don't matter
and this is just simply, uh, the dream content doesn't matter,
and that this is just a you know, a reverberation
of our of our concerns during the day. You know,
if you're stressed out, maybe you're I mean, that's what
we do with mental time travel. We run these scenarios
in real time, and we think, oh, my goodness, what

(46:19):
if I don't get there in time? What if I fail?
What if I don't get good enough good night's sleep
before the exam? Uh it makes sense that if you're
worrying about there in the day, you're gonna worry about
that at night. Uh. So it becomes, you know, difficult
to really characterize the purpose if there is one of
the dream content. I also looked at a paper titled
Inception the Exam Dream is Real by Alan J. Oxford,

(46:43):
The third published in a pin state law review. This
one is also fun because there were a lot of
Morpheus quotes what in the in the paper, but but
it was, it was very well written and uh and
of course it springs as the title suggests, from similar
situations with law students. And the paper is is lengthy
and wrestles with the viewpoint that while you know the

(47:04):
function of sleep and dreaming is vital for our survival,
you know, essentially restoring our energy, arguably to fragging the
hard drive, the content of our dreams, you know, may
very well be without purpose. Again according to some of
the models. Uh, you're the junk in your dreams may
simply be there because it's the same junk you've been
wrestling with all day, all week, all month as you

(47:26):
prepare for your tests. So I can't help but return
to this basic scenario of human survival that we've been
discussing here. You know that these dreams again are often
relating to periods of great stress and vulnerability, and they
are in a paper tiger sense of things, not unlike
states of birth. You know, a process is in place,

(47:48):
but there is a potential for things to go very wrong.
There's a risk and in many models of the afterlife.
The same scenario is also present in transferring to the
realms beyond death. Uh. Take Tibetan Buddhism, for instance, one
goes through a mental rehearsal, meditation, and practice so as
to ensure one's dying consciousness moves safely through all eight

(48:10):
stages of death to the death point. Confusing, but you know,
in many ways enlightening state that may last for many days. Oh,
I think about the ancient Egyptian sort of rehearsals for
the progress through the afterlife. Yeah, I think very similar scenario.
You know, it's something where it's like the the journey
is stressful, the journey is like birth, and there's a

(48:31):
lot of stuff that can go wrong if you're not
prepared for it. And uh, yeah, we see this in
various other spiritual models as well. So yeah, I think
that you know, for for most of human history, the
teenage years, a little before, a little after, you know this,
this was a time in which we were making these
big jumps out into the world, you know where, and

(48:51):
even in our own lives, like so much of the
time teenage years and then in college years if you
go to college or entering the workplace, etcetera. Like these
are dream these are periods of time in which we
have increasing responsibilities for ourself and our own destiny, our
own fate. However you want to uh, you know, you
want to package it and uh, you know, so it

(49:11):
makes sense that we would come back to this period
time and time again in dream, you know, either the
reverberation of the anxiety or just the reverberation of the metaphor,
you know, and uh, it's it's uh, you almost want
to think of it as this this thing in our
timeline that is just so potent that it's you know,
it's like sending waves back into into the past and

(49:32):
into the future at the same time. Yeah, well, I
feel like the question is still unanswered. But I think
the thing that we've talked about today that appeals to
me the most as an explanation is probably the the
it's it's tying into what you're saying now, like the
self identity narrative of the reminiscence bump. I think is
is a it seems like a very good candidate to

(49:52):
me that, like if if there is a general context
for what's happening in your life at a time when
you're making a lot of memories that are highly relevant
to what what you think about yourself and who you
think you are. Then those memories in that context are
going to be highly salient in in memory and will
be retrieved effortlessly throughout the rest of your life, even

(50:15):
maybe necessarily when you don't want them to be. And then,
of course, as you're saying, like the test, just the
test is a perfect metaphor in a way, like it
just does fit with so much else that's going to
happen throughout our life as a metaphor. Uh because because essentially,
like every major struggle is in a way a test, right,

(50:36):
and you know, an important test in high school or college. Uh,
it's it's it's a perfect example of a paper tiger,
right because you're not gonna die if you fail that exam.
But certainly failing important exams and tests can have, you know,
some some pretty major effects on your life, or at
least you know they can contribute to major twists and

(50:57):
turns in your timeline, or at least adults will definitely
tell you that it contributes. That's because that's the narrative
you're hit with, like this is an important test, like
this could this could you know, impact whether you get
into college or not, or if you have to go
work at the at the you know, the the shoe
tongue factory where they just make the tongues for shoes. Uh,
you know, I mean so you know, a lot of

(51:19):
it we can blame our parents for. I agree. Oh,
I didn't mean to blame our parents. I just mean that,
I mean, I think it is worth this should maybe
at least tempt us to think differently about what school
should be. Like I'm not saying, you know, I'm not
saying I know everything about education or you know, about
what's best for for high school age kids and what's

(51:39):
the best way for them to learn. But if high
school is causing these high school in college are causing
these horrible, you know memories that that plague people the
rest of their lives and they wake up in a
cold sweat thinking about tests, I don't know that that
could at least maybe be a sign that like there's
something structurally about the high school experience that could be different. Maybe.

(52:02):
But then I again, I also just wonder if you're
gonna have something similar no matter what you're going through
at that age. Again, I wish we had some great
data looking at individuals who go directly into military service
or or you know, directly into the workforce and or
in those cases you're just going to see different dream

(52:23):
content stemming from the same life period. But you know,
who knows, maybe in the future will have more robust
data to go from on this. All right, Well there
you have it. Oh, school dreams something that I think
everybody can relate to. Um, And if you can't relate
to it, we definitely want to hear from you about that.
So basically, no matter you know what your experience, you

(52:44):
probably have something to share here. UM. I'm not one
of those you know, some people you know will say, like,
you know, you never want to hear about somebody else's dreams,
like somebody's else's dreams are always boring. I strongly disagree.
I always want to hear about other people's dreams because
even if they are boring, it's telling like you earning
something about the inner space that defines someone else. Uh.
And then half the time though it's really weird and

(53:06):
uh and interesting in its own right. So right into us,
we'll tell you how to do that. But in the meantime,
if you want to listen to other episodes of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind, you'll find the Stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. Where else can you find it? Oh,
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(53:28):
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The best thing you can do to help us is
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a nice review and make sure you've again subscribed to

(53:49):
not only this show, but our other show, Invention as well.
Invention is a weekly exploration of human techno history, one
invention at a time. Huge thanks as always to our
excellent audio producers Steth Nicholas Johnson and Maya Cole. If
you would like to get in touch with us with
feedback about this episode or any other, to suggest a
topic for the future, to tell us about your dreams

(54:10):
or your lack of school dreams, or just to say hi,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
a production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works. For more

(54:30):
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