From the Vault: 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. (Originally published 8/22/2019)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time to go into the vault for a classic episode
of the show. This one originally aired on August nineteen,
and it's about that dream where you're back in school. Yes,
this is a fun one because this was exactly a
year ago. Uh. And also it's just a really it's

(00:26):
a really fun episode that we can all relate to.
I think we got more listener mail about this episode
than maybe any other, at least in the past few years.
Would wouldn't you agree, Like everybody wanted to tell us
about school dreams. Yeah, and I want to hear about him.
And yes, if you're hearing this episode for the first
time or the first time in exactly one year, I
want to hear about your updates, so and hear about

(00:47):
your new dreams. 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,

(01:10):
The feeling of 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.

(01:30):
That's right now, 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,

(01:51):
and if you don't pass, you'll be stuck in high
school forever. 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

(02:14):
and illegally burns trash in a metal drum in his backyard.
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.

(02:34):
And who's administering the exam? That's right, it's your old
rust Cal teacher, Christopher Lambert. Mr Lambert is asking everyone
to take their seats. The panic rushes up from your
gut into your throat. Is there any way out of this?
Your hand bolts up. Mr Lambert calls on you. He says, yes,
when is it? And the whole class turns to look

(02:56):
at you, scrutinizing, crinkling their noses in pity and disgust
ust 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.

(03:18):
You didn't bring a pencil, Sandra Bullock won't let you
borrow one, neither, well Ken Griffey Jr. The test is starting,
Mr lamb Berry Yell's eyes on your own paper. A
single tooth falls from your mouth and lands on page one.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. A production of

(03:39):
I Heart Radios has to work. Hey you, Welcome to
Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Land
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

(04:00):
really the worst. I have a lot of disdain for
the high school Dream because then I'll get into more
of it later. But but basically, it's 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

(04:22):
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 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.

(04:47):
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, 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 absolute,
really petrified. This is something that I think is worth
discussing a little bit because when you when when you
look at what the surveys of what people have dreamt about,

(05:09):
and there are different ways of conducting those surveys, so
it's there's going to be a fair amount of variety
there anyway, and it's a lot of it's also going
to 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 and small sample sizes, and that brings a you know,

(05:30):
it brings a lot of limitations and what kind of
life experiences the dreams then are 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
like a variety of dream that is, you know, filled
with anxiety or even dread without actually really breaking over

(05:51):
into this room that we think of as the domain
of nightmares. I guess 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

(06:12):
they're you know, a huge number of people's really bad
dreams are about like are 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

(06:33):
real definite place for the school dream. For instance. Uh.
In the nineteen thirty psychologist whole See case and conducted
a survey of nightmares and found their contents to be
uh like twenty seven percent dealing with animals seven percent,
being chased at death and murder at and then it
goes down to home and family falling and then miscellaneous

(06:57):
nineteen percent, accidents seventeen percent. And you see similar things
with other surveys. There's a Harvard psychologists Didra Barrett's survey
and it UH said like being chased with seventy two
death of family members in for six percent following UH
monsters and or animals made it on their thirty three

(07:17):
percent war, violent crimes, natural disaster. And then there's been
others that the kind of match this 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 percent following being chased feeling paralyzed,

(07:44):
but also twenty four percent being late to an important event,
which definitely lines up with a lot of what we're
talking about here, because so often the content is I
am I am late to the exam right um, or
I have I've let time slip away in advance of
the them. So yeah, it is going to come back
to like, how do we classify nightmares, and what do

(08:05):
we think of when we think of nightmares, 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

(08:26):
more more potent, you know, it would feel 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 the
definitive way. But like, what is the purpose of the

(08:48):
content of dreams, if anything to be in with 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

(09:09):
you can sort of divide into two schools of thought
where it's either the contents of the dreams 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 too wrote Study
of Dreams, and this was a book that outlined lucid dreaming,

(09:33):
for instance, but you know he covered 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 matters 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 what you dream

(09:56):
about actually has adaptive value in life or there 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, whether it's adaptive or not. Well,

(10:18):
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, uh 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 why am I still dreaming
about this thing? This thing is solved high school, you

(10:41):
know is solved. You know, it's I've I've I've been
out of it for you know, decades. Why do I
still return 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 fabric of my dreams. Yeah, So I want
to talk about a few common variations. I think just

(11:03):
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 or a test that
I never finished, and I don't know in like, there's

(11:25):
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 the dream
the worst way possible. And so I will sometimes have

(11:47):
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 where
you when you were teaching at that high school. I
mean I was fresh out of college, so I was, oh, yeah,

(12:07):
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 he's had this dream. I've
had this dream. I've talked to tons of people who

(12:28):
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, where I missed the deadline to
drop the class and or just forgot that I had

(12:51):
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 more in 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 calendar effect. Actually, I think about like, oh,
I wasn't going because I was doing this other thing

(13:11):
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 school environment, so being in high school or being

(13:31):
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. I I've
never had a problem getting to the dream classroom and

(13:52):
a dream. Another big one I think is school based embarrassment,
dreaming about like being embarrassed in front of a class
room 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 weird thing is I don't have any of those
related to actual class experiences. But but since I was

(14:17):
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,
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

(14:38):
this one pretty often. Uh, 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
the blending of workplaces to a certain extent, because I'll
have dreams where I didn't actually fully quit my previous job.

(15:00):
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
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

(15:22):
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. Yet,
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

(15:42):
the next thing. Yeah, yeah, all right, well maybe we
should take a break and then when we come back
we can analyze the school dream a little more. Alright,
we're back. So you know, in our cold open you
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 and the school anxiety dream.

(16:04):
I've never had a dream where or teeth fall out,
which really which is is weird because I mean, like
dental anxiety has It's kind of part of my upbringing
because you know, my father was a dentist. You know,
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.

(16:27):
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,
there's plenty of of of fuel there for the fire,
and yet that never happens in my dreams. That's interesting. Now,

(16:48):
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.
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

(17:10):
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
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 never the teeth. Well, so
back to the school dream. We know, at least anecdotally

(17:33):
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.
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

(17:54):
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
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,

(18:18):
just meaning that like in lots of studies, especially lots
of psychological studies, there is a disproportionate representation of people
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

(18:41):
all why college students would be dreaming about uh, school
and college and exams. And of course studies find that, yes,
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. The dreams about the category known
as school teachers and studying were the fourth most common

(19:01):
typical theme of dreams out of a list of like
fifty something common themes of dreams. But they're Canadian college students.
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 gorerits called frequency

(19:26):
of typical dream themes in most Recent dreams and online study.
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 apply to you in recent dreams. Uh.

(19:48):
And they said that their findings were mostly consistent with
other studies showing prevalence of dream themes in different populations.
They ended up ranking dream themes by prevalence and dream
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,

(20:10):
I mean six is arriving too late, which could be
very very well be couched in the same area. Right,
And 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

(20:33):
arriving too late, number five school teachers and studying 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 people are people are having flying dreams is

(20:56):
their number one. Lots of people have flying dreams. I
do not have two flying dreams I can remember i've
and then in 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

(21:17):
we have dreamt of? When we wake up. I hate that.
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

(21:39):
everyone is that that I was trying to move a
horse across um uh you know, like from one city
to another in a horse trailer, 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

(22:01):
trailer with the trailer hitch, which was you know, 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

(22:21):
at this moment, So what's going on? 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
of this fantastic ability to to make connections and things

(22:44):
and even like random assemblages, you know, we can come
up with the story if we 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 Danson represents that. Uh, you know, you can
come up with a version of it that makes sense.
Then does that have anything to do at all with
the the origin of the dream exactly? I mean that

(23:05):
might be a personally useful story to come up with.
I can see how it could 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,

(23:26):
I rarely have ever had a swimming dream, don't Hi.
I swim 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 studying is number
five the fifth most common theme of dreams uh in
people responding to this massive online survey. But simply checking

(23:49):
a box that says a recent dream 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

(24:11):
has anybody actually looked 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 he had obviously noticed the

(24:34):
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. They've all been at the

(24:55):
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 purpose of the inquiry, So there could be

(25:16):
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

(25:36):
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.

(25:56):
Nobody rated any recurring school dream better than three. Almost
all dreams were rated to 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

(26:18):
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. That seems like it goes
right along with this, you know, this archetype we talked

(26:39):
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

(27:00):
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

(27:22):
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

(27:43):
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

(28:04):
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 were
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

(28:24):
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

(28:46):
has you what's your experience 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 off 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, say who

(29:09):
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
the high school age stage of your life, like entering
the workforce or you know, whatever happened to you know,

(29:29):
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 common among people who
went to high school or college but have been long

(29:51):
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 of out at frequently. Yeah, like you can forget
everybody's name that you went to high school with based
with these dreams. I was reading an article by the
science writer Stephanie Poppas about this and and she led

(30:11):
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 on

(30:31):
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 lives. So, for example,
older adults, you take somebody maybe in their fifties or
sixties or seventies, they will seem to have greater access

(30:55):
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

(31:16):
that being a you know, a direct factor, and thats
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

(31:36):
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

(32:00):
olden time for having the most memories that are most
easily retrieved. And that it's also a reason perhaps that
you like so much with 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 the connection between this and the

(32:21):
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 around

(32:43):
the early twenties, they did, your ability to retrieve memories
declines 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, if

(33:05):
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,

(33:26):
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

(33:47):
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

(34:08):
the brain is physically most adept, it's you know, your brain,
is it optimized, high potential, it's making memories best than thosemies.
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 you 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

(34:29):
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

(34:50):
become a part of other groups and it would be
necessary for your survival. So like the teenage brain 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,

(35:12):
that's like identity 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.

(35:36):
Remember 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 in our memory,
and they sort of collapse because these are the mundane, boring,
grinding experiences. An our waiting in line for something feels
like it takes forever, but it takes up almost no

(35:57):
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

(36:18):
had 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.

(36:41):
But 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 past 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 freaking one's wedding if you've had

(37:02):
a 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

(37:24):
experiences than of 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
bum by Katie Waldman and Slade, and she pointed out
that there was a night study that found that nine

(37:46):
percent of 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 happened before. Well, we better we
better mark this one. We better make sure this one's

(38:06):
nice and vivid, 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. A lot of them are gonna be

(38:29):
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 stressed out about. You know. It's it's like

(38:52):
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 Waldman'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 explaining the reminiscence bump is that the

(39:13):
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 and studies have shown this experiences

(39:35):
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 is this is this this time of

(39:57):
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, So, you know, make list ten
statements about you saying like I am this, I am that,

(40:20):
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 a lot of things from their
like teenage in early twenties period. But studies find that

(40:40):
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 coincidence that the timeline of when

(41:02):
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.
But then again, uh in that article I was talking

(41:22):
about by Stephanie Poppas. She also interviews Michael Shreddle, who's
in charge of the sleep laboratory at the 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.

(41:42):
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

(42:05):
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

(42:26):
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 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

(42:48):
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 during tames 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 to this time? So I feel like that that

(43:11):
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
reality is that we also see these dreams occurring, you know,

(43:33):
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,
this brings brings us to this this broader question, right,

(43:54):
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
like the psychic digestive system of the sleeping mind. Uh. Anyway,

(44:18):
and this we end up, you know, coming back 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, we talked
about there being five different theories out there, predominant theories
about dreams that range from importance about dream content that

(44:40):
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 keep 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, or that
the brain is using the dream to simulate futures for

(45:01):
us so that we can act better in the waking
world and um and yeah, so we're looking around, and
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 the look that

(45:21):
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 primarily dream of failure,

(45:44):
being late, not being able to answer the questions on
the exam, etcetera. 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
dramatics nation of high concerns during the dreams, maybe training

(46:04):
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, you know, literally, how does it

(46:26):
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 you presented is with Because it also seems like, well, okay,

(46:47):
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 st stout, 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 if I don't get there in time? What if
I failed? What if I don't get good enough good

(47:09):
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,

(47:30):
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 the you know,

(47:51):
the 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

(48:13):
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, 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, but

(48:35):
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

(48:57):
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

(49:18):
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, we're and

(49:38):
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

(49:58):
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.
It is just so potent that it's you know, it's
like sending waves back into into the past and into

(50:19):
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 me.

(50:40):
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 and in memory and will be
retre eaved effortlessly throughout the rest of your life, even

(51:02):
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, and you know, an important test in

(51:24):
high school or college. Uh, it's it's it's a perfect
example of a paper tiger, right because you're not going
to die if you fail an 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 turns in
your timeline, or at least adults will definitely tell you

(51:47):
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 shoot tongue fact tree where
they just make the tongues for shoes. Uh you know,
I mean, so you know a lot of it we
can blame our parents for I agree, Oh, I didn't

(52:09):
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 the best way
for them to learn. But if high school is causing

(52:31):
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. But
then I again, I also just wonder if you're going

(52:52):
to have something similar no matter what you're going through
at that age. Ye. 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 content stemming from the same life period. But you know,

(53:14):
who knows, maybe in the future will have more robust
data to go from on this, All right, well there
you have it. Uh. 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
probably have something to share here. UM. I'm not one
of those you know, some people you know will say, like,

(53:36):
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're learning
something about the the inner space that defines someone else. Uh.
And then half the time, though it's really weird and
uh and interesting in its own right. So right into us,

(53:57):
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,
like everywhere wherever you get podcasts these days, which seems
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(54:19):
probably on that as well. Wherever you get the podcast,
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not only this show, but our other show, Invention as well.
Invention is a weekly exploration of human techno history, one

(54:43):
invention at a time. Huge thanks as always to our
excellent audio producers Sethan 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
or your lack of school dreams, or or just to
say hi, you can email us at contact at stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your

(55:15):
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