Once more I find myself on this strange but familiar campus. As always, I’m running, a madman with a bookbag, late for an appointment in hell. Down a hallway lies a classroom, and inside waits a desk—the desk of my doom.
I sit down; then someone passes me the final exam. All semester I have not cracked a single book. Before me lie pages of questions for which I have no answers. I grip my pen. The pale eye of the clock glares. My palms turn to sponges, and—and then ... sweet relief ... I wake up.
So goes my “exam dream,” which I’ve had about once a month since the late 1990s. Odds are you’ve had some version of it, too. In this nation of tests, few dreams are so familiar, recurring long after we put away our No. 2 pencils and textbooks. For many of us, the exam dream is an albatross gliding evermore over the dark seas of sleep, calling us back to the long ago.
In sleep we return to the classrooms where we once fretted over questions and fumbled for the answers. And these settings are no coincidence. “Children start with test-taking very early—it’s often their first school experience,” says Eleanor Rosch, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley.
Ms. Rosch recalls taking a spelling test in second or third grade. She wrote down the first few words, but then she froze. “There was this mounting terror of figuring out the next word,” she says. Such moments, she explains, can imprint themselves in our memories, becoming symbols of emotions and fears we experience years, or even decades, later.
The dream can be especially powerful among those who never leave the land of learning. After all, even the highest positions come with scrutiny; the tenured merely trade tests for other trials. “You’re being evaluated on your evaluation of someone else’s journal article,” Ms. Rosch says.
Like real exams, the exam dream may take many forms. William G. Durden, president of Dickinson College, sometimes dreams that he’s an anxious student who’s forgotten to write a paper. He must finish the assignment to graduate, but he cannot. That dream merges with another in which he’s a college president with no degrees—a phony in plain sight.
These nightmares, Mr. Durden believes, speak to his past: He was the first in his family to attend college, so he had grown up with no narrative for his eventual success. “At a very primordially emotional level,” he says, “I appear to find it very hard to believe that I actually have a degree.”
Over time, some dreamers of exam dreams experience a shift in perspective. As a history professor at Grinnell College, Marci Sortor long dreamed that she had exams in geometry and Spanish but had not been attending either class. In the dream, she couldn’t remember where the classrooms were, or how to find her locker, which contained her textbooks. Eventually, Ms. Sortor’s dream-self resolved to drop one course and study hard for the other. “Somehow my subconscious was satisfied,” she says.
The dream vanished, only to return as the professor’s version, in which she was late for class, frantically wondering how she would explain herself to her students and her department chair. “Meanwhile, I’m climbing mountains, jumping over crevasses, and swimming across moats,” she says.
That dream faded after Ms. Sortor became vice president for institutional planning. Now she dreams that she’s late for an administrative meeting, a horror within a horror, if you will.
The venues of dreams may vary according to one’s interests. Benjamin B. Dunlap, president of Wofford College, suspects that he’s never had the exam dream because he’s rarely doubted his intellectual abilities or verbal skills (Rhodes Scholars are like that, you know). Yet Mr. Dunlap—who’s published poems, written television scripts, and danced for a ballet company—has long valued artistic excellence above other kinds.
So perhaps it’s not surprising that in his own recurring dream he’s a pianist faking his way through a concerto before a large audience. “I’m improvising along with the orchestra, then I realize I’ve run out of gas, I’m not able to keep up, and I’m just seconds away from people discovering that I’m a total fraud,” he says. “It’s dreadful.”
In other words, Mr. Dunlap, who likes to noodle about on the Steinway in the president’s house, believes anxiety follows one’s most profound aspirations into slumber. But that doesn’t mean his dream lacks metaphorical ties to the present. After all, his job demands constant improvisation and buckets of confidence; he describes being a college president as “performance art.”
“These dreams represent a kind of psychic modesty or intellectual integrity,” he says, “the uneasy feeling that you’re getting away with something and might get called out.”
That uneasy feeling can creep over anyone, be it a president or a plumber. By no means are dreams set in school or college the exclusive bane of those who work in education. Merely attending college is enough to get you into the club. My brother-in-law Greg Stuckey, a computer-systems analyst in Illinois, still dreams that he failed a college course, usually English, that kept him from graduating. Every couple of months, Elizabeth Brotherton, a writer I know in Washington, dreams that she must take an exam for a class she’s skipped all semester; often the dream comes when she’s feeling overwhelmed.
Ann McClure, a real-estate agent I know in Virginia, sometimes dreams that she’s standing in her cap and gown when she realizes that she hasn’t passed a class she needed to graduate. Martha Floyd, who works in the same office, still dreams about taking a big test for which she’s not prepared, 32 years after graduating from college. And my dear friend Bryn Chalkley has a jarring version of the exam dream about twice a month. “Going into a situation blind definitely makes me nervous,” she says, “and I guess this scenario is an easy or tangible experience for me to apply that kind of anxiety.”
In some form, the exam dream may be more common among Americans than all but one other type—the nightmare in which we are running from someone or something. This is according to Deirdre Barrett, an assistant clinical professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, who has reviewed more dream-frequency studies and surveys of dreamers than you ever knew existed. She suspects that people go on dreaming of academic tasks because much of our “symbolic imagery” is set during adolescence, when tests are literally an everyday burden.
“This is when our emotional wiring is getting laid down, and a lot of our emotions are associated with certain visual imagery,” Ms. Barrett says. “People have basic anxieties about other people evaluating them. And our society puts a pretty strong value on test-taking.”
A defining feature of many exam dreams is the dreamer’s role in his or her own demise. The psychic gist isn’t so much that the big test is a monster, but that one has somehow ushered the monster in, by skipping class or failing to prepare for a task. In the end, we seem to judge ourselves more harshly than the grader of any exam might.
So those who’ve never had such a dream should be very glad. To everyone else, there’s just one more thing to say: See you in class.
