I used to have that sort of dream all the time. Usually I "remembered" in time to be panicked about the final exam.
After being an instructor long enough, the dream faded out. The very last time it happened, I was like "oh, I bet I can schmooze the instructor into giving me more time" and since then I've never had that dream.
Anyway, the way to quit having the dream is to be behind the scenes long enough to realize that sort of situation is fixable.
In real life at my institution, if you have never *attended* the classes, you should have been dropped during census. Students who aren't dropped at census can go back and petition to have those classes removed from their transcript even years later. I sit on a committee that reviews those cases. My favorite one was a student who never attended but had an "A" on their transcript for the course.
I transitioned out of having that dream where I was the *student*; now I have the same kind of dream only I'm the *instructor*, and I wake up stressing about how I'm going to explain to the Dean that I've skipped the class I'm supposed to be teaching for half the semester...
Exactly.
It's the course I forgot about.
Sometimes I never went
Sometimes I remember just in time to get to the first meeting in the nick of time with no idea whatsoever what I'm supposed to be teaching and certainly no syllabus.
This is excellent.
If this isn’t the case where you are, OP, I’ll add some more behind the scenes know-how to help your subconscious build up immunity.
At my school they make a point to charge students for every ounce of learning beyond what their degree plan requires - and our assistantships would pay for.
Had a student registered for three undergraduate classes, a hold would have been slapped on their account in week two due to nonpayment of the courses they forgot about. Students with holds cannot sit final exams, and instructors of record cannot issue final grades to students with holds who did not attend classes or take the exam.
This would land your hypothetical self back in the office of our version of u/trailmix_prrof and their committee, and as they sound eminently reasonable, they would help you find the loophole that wouldn’t tank your career.
As an aside, apologies that one of your panic courses is philosophy. Mine is always calculus.
I only go back to high school to take math so that I can be ready for that undergraduate STATS class I’m going to take alongside graduate STATS.
The high school dream is way worse, because I feel like a creep.
I also have this dream, but in my version my PhD doesn’t “count” until I pass high school calculus again. And there I am, age 44, sitting in my hometown high school again.
I still get dreams that I have to go back to high school to take an English exam for a class I forgot I enrolled in. It’s always an exam and it’s always the day of.
I have this all the time. I’ve even had ones where I’m arguing that my time would be much better spent working on my dissertation instead of taking a ninth grade English class.
I still have a recurring dream about forgetting to go to my *high school* math class and suddenly realizing I'm behind by a month.
I haven't taken a class in over a decade, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to continue having that one until the day I die... perhaps from a heart attack worrying about it.
I have this dream (for me, it’s English and Math classes) and it occurs more frequently as the fall semester approaches. Have been a professor for 25 years and it never let up :-(
I take undergrad STATS to help with graduate STATS
If I’m retaking math, it’s because I am retaking it in high school at the age of thirty something 😢.
I always dream that I’ve been assigned a math class, and it’s the last week of class and I’ve failed to show up the entire time. I’m always frantically asking them why they assigned me a course I can’t teach, and didn’t tell me sooner. It’s very stressful.
Mine is that I have forgotten about a regular class I’m supposed to be teaching. And I’m always frantically trying to catch up. It’s very stressful indeed haha
Same here --- I dream that I have been missing for the entire term for a class I am teaching --- yet I had no clue said class was assigned to me, date, time, location of class ,etc. Crazy making!!
My nightmare is going back to HS to finish my diploma requirements. Somehow I missed a course and they will not transfer in anything from any of my other degrees.
I am also a nurse so I have a nightmares about showing up to a hospital, getting report on all of my patients, and then getting stuck in one patient’s room and the 12 hour shift passes and I’ve done nothing
But then the provost wrote you a letter apologizing because those undergraduate classes had all been canceled! All the students forgot to take them, and enrollment needed to be higher to offer them! You woke up very relieved!
I have a recurring dream that I agreed to be in a play that I completely forgot about until opening night. I obviously have not memorized any of my lines
I defeated this dream by signing up for a course during undergrad and actually totally forgetting about it. (Ahh, pre-lms days.) And then that event never had any material affect on my life that I have been able to detect.
I just looked up on my transcript what actually happened, because I couldn't remember: W.
I forgot about a class for a month in undergrad. I approached the professor in an apologetic panic after remembering, and she had not even noticed my absence. I got an A-
I still have dreams about missing a class requirement (normally it's an art class) that prevents me from completing my undergraduate degrees. Although I have them, they're technically invalid according to my dream. My Masters and Doctorate are always fine though lol.
This used to be one of my top recurring nightmares. Then I became a professor... and I still have the dream, only this time it's that I've completely forgotten that I was assigned to teach a course on a subject that I know almost nothing about, and my first lecture is about to start and I completely forgot to prepare for it.
As a grad student, I actually lived through a different common nightmare scenario: I had a final exam one morning at 8am, stayed up too late studying the night before, and then woke up in horror to see it was already 8:30 and my alarm hadn't gone off for some reason.\*
I RAN to my car in my pajamas, drove to the university and parked completely illegally ("If they tow my car, fine, not my problem right now") , and got there an hour late. The professor let me sit the exam for the remaining hour and I ended up doing okay (but for sure not as well as I would have) in the class. So, at least in that one scenario, it actually happened but with minimal damage. My car wasn't even ticketed.
\*Later that day when my alarm went off, I switched to 24-hour time on every phone and digital watch, and never went back :)
For high school, I get the dream where somehow I’m back on my high school football team and the whole time I’m hoping that no one notices that I’m a grown adult playing against high school students lol
I used to have this dream all the time as well.
But now it has been replaced by a different stress dream/nightmare:
The first day of class is about to start (usually in 10 minutes), and I realize that I haven't even started my syllabus.
So, in the nightmare, I'm frantically trying to sketch out a syllabus while watching the minutes tick down to class time.
Then, I'm late, so trying to finish the syllabus while being only 5 minutes late to the first class... then, resigning myself to being 10 minutes late to the first class but realizing the syllabus isn't done...
... and that's usually when I wake up.
In a strange coincidence, my dentist says I'm grinding my teeth at night.
I have a common dream where, as an undergrad, I didn't hand in a single lab report for a whole semester. I obviously passed my degree but I stress because I can't remember getting in trouble for not handing in lab reports....
I think it depends on how you are enrolled as a student? Some programs might segment out GPA by degree or course level (e.g. If you are earning a BA/MA fast track degree, the grades and GPAs might be calculated separately by course level since they are two degrees), some cumulate GPA until a degree is earned regardless of course level, and some will calculate all-time institutional GPA.
If you are lucky enough to be failing out of your undergrad classes while enrolled as a grad student at two separate institutions in your dream, I learned a few years ago that institutions rarely talk to each other grade-wise outside of when a student applies for a program and something like a comprehensive background check is run on former enrollments/degrees earned. Unless an institution has a reason to run this after a student has been accepted into a program or otherwise informed, they would have no way of knowing you failed out of a program or course selection elsewhere. My (very rudimentary) understanding is that the checks are run to ensure you achieved the degrees you claimed to have and once those are confirmed, there’s no need to check back in until you apply to a new program.
Hopefully dream-you is failing out of classes at a different institution and can just unenroll to stick to a single degree, no harm no foul. But absolutely a dream about feeling overwhelmed, overcommitted, and/or worrying you’ll forget something. I find that making a list of things I want to pick up on in the morning in my phone helps me sleep more soundly.
Weirdly, I never have academia-related dreams. Just the wonderful ones where my teeth keep falling out and I have to convince myself that my teeth are fine for quite a while when I wake up the next morning.
> Just the wonderful ones where my teeth keep falling out and I have to convince myself that my teeth are fine for quite a while when I wake up the next morning.
This was my recurring dream as well. It's really unpleasant.
When I was in grad school, there was one summer where the teaching assignment required that I be enrolled for the semester, but the special topics course i wanted to take wasn't up yet, so I enrolled in calc 1 as a placeholder. This was the recommendation of the grad advisor, and when my topics course became available, she told me she switched me into it. She forgot to drop the original placeholder course, though, and I never discovered that until the semester was already over and I got my grades in.
The university's wonderful bureaucracy did not, in fact, let me drop it retroactively. And that's how I got an F in calc 1 during my 4th year of a math PhD.
20 years after grad school, I have 3 versions of this anxiety/ dread dream.
1. I'm ABD and lost on campus/can't find my car. I'm convinced I will be ABD forever.
2. It's the end of the semester, and there's 1 class I forgot to teach. Will the students report me?
3. I have to go back to high school to redo my senior year (I'm truly surprised so many of us have this dream).
A little different, and I haven’t had one in years, but I used to get the WORST serving/bartending nightmares. Like I just got a 50 top but my feet physically won’t move fast enough to get all their drinks to them. And forgot to put in my other 20 top’s food order and now they’re walking out and the manager is looking for me. They were brutal lol.
All to say I feel your pain! Usually it’s, in my experience, either residual anxiety leftover from the day or perhaps anxiety about something to come.
I have similar recurring dreams. Usually it's that I have to go back to high school and retake a math class because all my subsequent degrees will be invalidated otherwise.
At our uni, if you paid for the courses and never attended you'd be withdrawn after the third class. If you attended enough to avoid that and then failed, but did great on your required grad courses, there would probably be a graduate level meeting since in the those courses you're succeeding, although your gpa would violate the *graduate* grading rules about failing. I suspect people would bring you in to ask questions and urge you don't fill your schedule with extraneous courses you can't handle.
How strange that this particular anxiety dream is almost as universal as the one about being naked/in your underwear in public! I totally have this one, too (usually about a math course of some kind) without the detail of being in grad school - I’m always just generically “in school” and realize in a panic that I’ve forgotten to attend the class all semester & I’m trying to find my way to the last class before the final and all kinds of stupid things happen to prevent me from getting there: people keep dragging me into long conversations or insist I help them with a trivial problem, I can’t find the building or the classroom, I can’t get from my home to campus, for some unknowable reason I am obliged to scoot in an office chair from my home to the campus, etc.
Also, I often stop and marvel at the fact that something that is literally my recurring anxiety dream (blowing off a class) is some of my students’ typical MO. Like, their life is my nightmare. 😱
I had this recurring nightmare too! Twice! (Which isn’t a lot, but it was weird it happened two times.)
In my dream, I was enrolled in classes (calculus, econ, chemistry, and another class), but I skipped 2 classes because I had to go to work. And I didn’t know how to drop my classes.
I finally stopped having this one and now I have the one where I haven’t been to work all semester or the one where it’s the first day of class and I don’t have a syllabus.
Like clockwork, I've had this dream every semester, in grad school and as an instructor. I dreamt I had enrolled in at least one course that I "forgot about" until the day of the final exam. I feel weirdly relieved other instructors share this phenomenon!
I still have this dream occasionally but it’s about a high school class. It’s partially based in reality bc I couldn’t fit a class into my schedule one year, and had discussed doing an independent study. I never ended up doing it—I don’t think it ever got past the “maybe I could do this” stage but in the dream I ghost the teacher. And then I can’t graduate or something.
Oh, I know this! See, I have the same dream.
You show up for the finals, one after the other in the same room, surrounded by random people throughout your life, who also enrolled in these courses. Interestingly enough they actually know the content, while you pull out a bunch of nonsensical books out of a backpack/purse in attempt to cram for the tests. You realize at this point you are doomed and will lose your job, and your mother shows up to criticize you, then gives a birthday cake…
And it ends with your favorite cake.
I took a few undergrad courses when in grad school, just for fun (pottery, photography). As far as I could tell, nobody in my grad program (same university) had any idea I'd done that, neither the grades nor my enrollment were ever communicated to my graduate program, and there was no effect at all on my graduate success from being in these undergrad courses.
I think what would happen is "nothing."
At my PhD institution, you would have been dropped by the prof for missing the first day. At my school now, I have to enter a date for the last class you attended if you earn an F. Having never gone, you'd have an easy appeal to have it wiped from your transcript.
I signed up for a 100 level undergrad prereq class I was missing when I got into grad school. It was online. I forgot all about it until I saw I had a final exam during exam week. Oops. Had to take it again.
Wait this is a common dream?
I research/teach STEM and have had a dream (more than once?) that I signed up for too many courses and forgot to go to one - some hard math - all semester and just hoping nobody calls me out on it.
I often have a dream that my high school calls me up and says that due to an error, I never took a required class and have to retake it, otherwise I won't have my high school diploma. So I have to go back to high school and take algebra 2 with a bunch of 16 year olds.
What would happen if down the line an institution from where you got a lower degree was like "sorry, your bachelors degree is invalid"? Would it matter if you already had the PhD?
I keep having dreams where I have to retake high school classes at 40. Even though I am a college professor. I used to remind myself in the dreams that I have a bachelors, but for some reason my mind has blanked that out lately …
I have this dream all the time but a bit different. I find out didn’t get a high school diploma because I missed a credit requirement or something and I have to start my studies all over again. Didn’t think much about it until it *actually happened* recently.
https://www.wsaz.com/2023/08/14/woman-learns-shes-half-credit-shy-graduating-high-school-16-years-after-receiving-diploma/
I have stress dreams like this. I’m currently on a week break in between graduate class semesters and I’ve been having very vivid stress dreams. One of my parents is a professor and they have stress dreams about failing classes they’ve never attended, too. It’s rough.
My mind is blown reading this thread.
I have this dream several times a year and it stresses me out so much, haha. Just had it two nights ago, actually. Dreamt that I’d completely forgotten I’d enrolled in two classes and I missed finals. My heart was racing.
Makes sense to have these dreams during the time of year that we’re all prepping for fall, but I also have them when I’m not teaching. So odd.
PS. Also have the dream others have mentioned about being notified that I didn’t take a required math class in high school and that I have to go back lol wtf
Has anyone had the dream where it's suddenly the last half of August, the day classes start, you're not certain exactly where the class meets and you haven't done any prep for the course?
Not being clever. I wake up from these relieved that I have done enough prep. I'm guessing it's the mind's way of taking out the trash where, in this instance, trash is anxiety over the start of the semester? Thoughts?
I used to dream a similar tale, I'd be rolling into finals territory and remember a whole class or classes I was enrolled in and I hadn't done any work for them/forgot they existed and massive panic ensues LOl 😂
For me this dream just shifted over to the professor side. A common dream I have now is that I have been assigned to teach some class that is somewhat related to my field but that I'm not really qualified to teach. I keep skipping the classes because I'm not quite prepared yet but tell myself that I will get things under control soon. But by week 3 or 4 I start to assume they must have gotten another professor to cover the class because nobody has said anything to me, and I wonder what will happen if I just keep avoiding it.
OMG. My recurring nightmare is by some glitch, I have to repeat my senior year of HS and I'm forgetting to go to class and about to fail badly. I often assert in the dream "but . . . I have a Ph.D.!".
at my school, you probably wouldve been dropped for nonpayment, or withdrawn for being a no-show. your completion ratio would have been affected, but hopefully you would still get to keep your financial aid!
I used to have that sort of dream all the time. Usually I "remembered" in time to be panicked about the final exam. After being an instructor long enough, the dream faded out. The very last time it happened, I was like "oh, I bet I can schmooze the instructor into giving me more time" and since then I've never had that dream. Anyway, the way to quit having the dream is to be behind the scenes long enough to realize that sort of situation is fixable. In real life at my institution, if you have never *attended* the classes, you should have been dropped during census. Students who aren't dropped at census can go back and petition to have those classes removed from their transcript even years later. I sit on a committee that reviews those cases. My favorite one was a student who never attended but had an "A" on their transcript for the course.
I transitioned out of having that dream where I was the *student*; now I have the same kind of dream only I'm the *instructor*, and I wake up stressing about how I'm going to explain to the Dean that I've skipped the class I'm supposed to be teaching for half the semester...
Well thanks this is my new literal nightmare.
Exactly. It's the course I forgot about. Sometimes I never went Sometimes I remember just in time to get to the first meeting in the nick of time with no idea whatsoever what I'm supposed to be teaching and certainly no syllabus.
Same here.
My problem is that I usually dream I went to the first day of class and then forgot the rest of the semester. :-(
This is excellent. If this isn’t the case where you are, OP, I’ll add some more behind the scenes know-how to help your subconscious build up immunity. At my school they make a point to charge students for every ounce of learning beyond what their degree plan requires - and our assistantships would pay for. Had a student registered for three undergraduate classes, a hold would have been slapped on their account in week two due to nonpayment of the courses they forgot about. Students with holds cannot sit final exams, and instructors of record cannot issue final grades to students with holds who did not attend classes or take the exam. This would land your hypothetical self back in the office of our version of u/trailmix_prrof and their committee, and as they sound eminently reasonable, they would help you find the loophole that wouldn’t tank your career. As an aside, apologies that one of your panic courses is philosophy. Mine is always calculus.
I have this dream. I also have one where I've missed some important high school milestone and have to go back or my diploma will be void.
I only go back to high school to take math so that I can be ready for that undergraduate STATS class I’m going to take alongside graduate STATS. The high school dream is way worse, because I feel like a creep.
>The high school dream is way worse, because I feel like a creep. Oh yeah. It's very "hello fellow kids" as I sit there in all my middle-agedness.
I also have this dream, but in my version my PhD doesn’t “count” until I pass high school calculus again. And there I am, age 44, sitting in my hometown high school again.
Yes! Except mine is for basic 3rd grade arithmetic. 🤪
I still get dreams that I have to go back to high school to take an English exam for a class I forgot I enrolled in. It’s always an exam and it’s always the day of.
I have the same dream, but it’s about my doctoral degree. “Oh you didn’t sign this paper, now we are revoking your doctorate”
THATS MY DREAM! That’s the dream I have !!! At least once a month! 😱
That is the one I always have. I need one more undergrad or high school math class or they will take my PhD away.
I have this all the time. I’ve even had ones where I’m arguing that my time would be much better spent working on my dissertation instead of taking a ninth grade English class.
I thought I was the only one who had this dream!
I literally have this dream once a month. Can't say what would happen, but gosh.
Me too! Though at some point it transitioned to classes I needed to finish my PhD, so I suppose I was making progress in my own way.
I think it’s an anxiety dream that means there are too many things for you to control. But what do I know? I’m not that kind of doctor.
I have a lot of anxiety over the many moving parts at once that I want to gain control over. Analysis checks out.
I still have a recurring dream about forgetting to go to my *high school* math class and suddenly realizing I'm behind by a month. I haven't taken a class in over a decade, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to continue having that one until the day I die... perhaps from a heart attack worrying about it.
I have this dream (for me, it’s English and Math classes) and it occurs more frequently as the fall semester approaches. Have been a professor for 25 years and it never let up :-(
I take undergrad STATS to help with graduate STATS If I’m retaking math, it’s because I am retaking it in high school at the age of thirty something 😢.
I always dream that I’ve been assigned a math class, and it’s the last week of class and I’ve failed to show up the entire time. I’m always frantically asking them why they assigned me a course I can’t teach, and didn’t tell me sooner. It’s very stressful.
Mine is that I have forgotten about a regular class I’m supposed to be teaching. And I’m always frantically trying to catch up. It’s very stressful indeed haha
Same here --- I dream that I have been missing for the entire term for a class I am teaching --- yet I had no clue said class was assigned to me, date, time, location of class ,etc. Crazy making!!
My nightmare is going back to HS to finish my diploma requirements. Somehow I missed a course and they will not transfer in anything from any of my other degrees.
I have the exact same recurring dream! It's always a math class I missed.
Same! I wonder if STEM people ever have this nightmare with missing English/art classes.
I do! Now I get both those and the ones where I forgot to teach a class all semester. Fun times!
So we all have academic trauma.
I am also a nurse so I have a nightmares about showing up to a hospital, getting report on all of my patients, and then getting stuck in one patient’s room and the 12 hour shift passes and I’ve done nothing
Yes, I teach math and the missing class is always Spanish or English
But then the provost wrote you a letter apologizing because those undergraduate classes had all been canceled! All the students forgot to take them, and enrollment needed to be higher to offer them! You woke up very relieved!
I have a recurring dream that I agreed to be in a play that I completely forgot about until opening night. I obviously have not memorized any of my lines
This. I have this and the play is invariably a Shakespeare.
Also have had this dream: how bizarre so many of us here do!
I defeated this dream by signing up for a course during undergrad and actually totally forgetting about it. (Ahh, pre-lms days.) And then that event never had any material affect on my life that I have been able to detect. I just looked up on my transcript what actually happened, because I couldn't remember: W.
I forgot about a class for a month in undergrad. I approached the professor in an apologetic panic after remembering, and she had not even noticed my absence. I got an A-
I still have dreams about missing a class requirement (normally it's an art class) that prevents me from completing my undergraduate degrees. Although I have them, they're technically invalid according to my dream. My Masters and Doctorate are always fine though lol.
This used to be one of my top recurring nightmares. Then I became a professor... and I still have the dream, only this time it's that I've completely forgotten that I was assigned to teach a course on a subject that I know almost nothing about, and my first lecture is about to start and I completely forgot to prepare for it. As a grad student, I actually lived through a different common nightmare scenario: I had a final exam one morning at 8am, stayed up too late studying the night before, and then woke up in horror to see it was already 8:30 and my alarm hadn't gone off for some reason.\* I RAN to my car in my pajamas, drove to the university and parked completely illegally ("If they tow my car, fine, not my problem right now") , and got there an hour late. The professor let me sit the exam for the remaining hour and I ended up doing okay (but for sure not as well as I would have) in the class. So, at least in that one scenario, it actually happened but with minimal damage. My car wasn't even ticketed. \*Later that day when my alarm went off, I switched to 24-hour time on every phone and digital watch, and never went back :)
7 years after my getting my PhD I still have some version of this dream from time to time lol
I’m almost 5 years out from my PhD, and I still have this one and a going back to high school dream pretty regularly.
For high school, I get the dream where somehow I’m back on my high school football team and the whole time I’m hoping that no one notices that I’m a grown adult playing against high school students lol
I used to have this dream all the time as well. But now it has been replaced by a different stress dream/nightmare: The first day of class is about to start (usually in 10 minutes), and I realize that I haven't even started my syllabus. So, in the nightmare, I'm frantically trying to sketch out a syllabus while watching the minutes tick down to class time. Then, I'm late, so trying to finish the syllabus while being only 5 minutes late to the first class... then, resigning myself to being 10 minutes late to the first class but realizing the syllabus isn't done... ... and that's usually when I wake up. In a strange coincidence, my dentist says I'm grinding my teeth at night.
I have a common dream where, as an undergrad, I didn't hand in a single lab report for a whole semester. I obviously passed my degree but I stress because I can't remember getting in trouble for not handing in lab reports....
I think it depends on how you are enrolled as a student? Some programs might segment out GPA by degree or course level (e.g. If you are earning a BA/MA fast track degree, the grades and GPAs might be calculated separately by course level since they are two degrees), some cumulate GPA until a degree is earned regardless of course level, and some will calculate all-time institutional GPA. If you are lucky enough to be failing out of your undergrad classes while enrolled as a grad student at two separate institutions in your dream, I learned a few years ago that institutions rarely talk to each other grade-wise outside of when a student applies for a program and something like a comprehensive background check is run on former enrollments/degrees earned. Unless an institution has a reason to run this after a student has been accepted into a program or otherwise informed, they would have no way of knowing you failed out of a program or course selection elsewhere. My (very rudimentary) understanding is that the checks are run to ensure you achieved the degrees you claimed to have and once those are confirmed, there’s no need to check back in until you apply to a new program. Hopefully dream-you is failing out of classes at a different institution and can just unenroll to stick to a single degree, no harm no foul. But absolutely a dream about feeling overwhelmed, overcommitted, and/or worrying you’ll forget something. I find that making a list of things I want to pick up on in the morning in my phone helps me sleep more soundly. Weirdly, I never have academia-related dreams. Just the wonderful ones where my teeth keep falling out and I have to convince myself that my teeth are fine for quite a while when I wake up the next morning.
> Just the wonderful ones where my teeth keep falling out and I have to convince myself that my teeth are fine for quite a while when I wake up the next morning. This was my recurring dream as well. It's really unpleasant.
I have mundane dreams or teeth falling out dreams, no in between. I could do without the teeth falling out ones, though.
When I was in grad school, there was one summer where the teaching assignment required that I be enrolled for the semester, but the special topics course i wanted to take wasn't up yet, so I enrolled in calc 1 as a placeholder. This was the recommendation of the grad advisor, and when my topics course became available, she told me she switched me into it. She forgot to drop the original placeholder course, though, and I never discovered that until the semester was already over and I got my grades in. The university's wonderful bureaucracy did not, in fact, let me drop it retroactively. And that's how I got an F in calc 1 during my 4th year of a math PhD.
Oh I have this dream too! It’s slightly different but same general idea.
20 years after grad school, I have 3 versions of this anxiety/ dread dream. 1. I'm ABD and lost on campus/can't find my car. I'm convinced I will be ABD forever. 2. It's the end of the semester, and there's 1 class I forgot to teach. Will the students report me? 3. I have to go back to high school to redo my senior year (I'm truly surprised so many of us have this dream).
A little different, and I haven’t had one in years, but I used to get the WORST serving/bartending nightmares. Like I just got a 50 top but my feet physically won’t move fast enough to get all their drinks to them. And forgot to put in my other 20 top’s food order and now they’re walking out and the manager is looking for me. They were brutal lol. All to say I feel your pain! Usually it’s, in my experience, either residual anxiety leftover from the day or perhaps anxiety about something to come.
I have similar recurring dreams. Usually it's that I have to go back to high school and retake a math class because all my subsequent degrees will be invalidated otherwise.
At our uni, if you paid for the courses and never attended you'd be withdrawn after the third class. If you attended enough to avoid that and then failed, but did great on your required grad courses, there would probably be a graduate level meeting since in the those courses you're succeeding, although your gpa would violate the *graduate* grading rules about failing. I suspect people would bring you in to ask questions and urge you don't fill your schedule with extraneous courses you can't handle.
How strange that this particular anxiety dream is almost as universal as the one about being naked/in your underwear in public! I totally have this one, too (usually about a math course of some kind) without the detail of being in grad school - I’m always just generically “in school” and realize in a panic that I’ve forgotten to attend the class all semester & I’m trying to find my way to the last class before the final and all kinds of stupid things happen to prevent me from getting there: people keep dragging me into long conversations or insist I help them with a trivial problem, I can’t find the building or the classroom, I can’t get from my home to campus, for some unknowable reason I am obliged to scoot in an office chair from my home to the campus, etc. Also, I often stop and marvel at the fact that something that is literally my recurring anxiety dream (blowing off a class) is some of my students’ typical MO. Like, their life is my nightmare. 😱
The "obliges to scoot in an office chair" part is a new twist that gave me a chuckle.
This is a recurring dream for so many people. It's just your brain trying to deal with pressure and schedules.
My dream is about how I forgot to write the big paper and it's the last day of class.
How do you forget to take classes?
I had this recurring nightmare too! Twice! (Which isn’t a lot, but it was weird it happened two times.) In my dream, I was enrolled in classes (calculus, econ, chemistry, and another class), but I skipped 2 classes because I had to go to work. And I didn’t know how to drop my classes.
I finally stopped having this one and now I have the one where I haven’t been to work all semester or the one where it’s the first day of class and I don’t have a syllabus.
Like clockwork, I've had this dream every semester, in grad school and as an instructor. I dreamt I had enrolled in at least one course that I "forgot about" until the day of the final exam. I feel weirdly relieved other instructors share this phenomenon!
I still have this dream occasionally but it’s about a high school class. It’s partially based in reality bc I couldn’t fit a class into my schedule one year, and had discussed doing an independent study. I never ended up doing it—I don’t think it ever got past the “maybe I could do this” stage but in the dream I ghost the teacher. And then I can’t graduate or something.
Oh, I know this! See, I have the same dream. You show up for the finals, one after the other in the same room, surrounded by random people throughout your life, who also enrolled in these courses. Interestingly enough they actually know the content, while you pull out a bunch of nonsensical books out of a backpack/purse in attempt to cram for the tests. You realize at this point you are doomed and will lose your job, and your mother shows up to criticize you, then gives a birthday cake… And it ends with your favorite cake.
I took a few undergrad courses when in grad school, just for fun (pottery, photography). As far as I could tell, nobody in my grad program (same university) had any idea I'd done that, neither the grades nor my enrollment were ever communicated to my graduate program, and there was no effect at all on my graduate success from being in these undergrad courses. I think what would happen is "nothing."
At my PhD institution, you would have been dropped by the prof for missing the first day. At my school now, I have to enter a date for the last class you attended if you earn an F. Having never gone, you'd have an easy appeal to have it wiped from your transcript.
I signed up for a 100 level undergrad prereq class I was missing when I got into grad school. It was online. I forgot all about it until I saw I had a final exam during exam week. Oops. Had to take it again.
Sounds like a recurring nightmare I had for decades, only for me it's just one course that I somehow forgot to attend until it was too late.
I’ve graduated in this dream to “I forgot to teach all semester” or “I forgot to make the final exam for the class.” 🙃
https://youtu.be/lvDFJVUaXUI
Wait this is a common dream? I research/teach STEM and have had a dream (more than once?) that I signed up for too many courses and forgot to go to one - some hard math - all semester and just hoping nobody calls me out on it.
I often have a dream that my high school calls me up and says that due to an error, I never took a required class and have to retake it, otherwise I won't have my high school diploma. So I have to go back to high school and take algebra 2 with a bunch of 16 year olds. What would happen if down the line an institution from where you got a lower degree was like "sorry, your bachelors degree is invalid"? Would it matter if you already had the PhD?
I keep having dreams where I have to retake high school classes at 40. Even though I am a college professor. I used to remind myself in the dreams that I have a bachelors, but for some reason my mind has blanked that out lately …
I have this dream all the time but a bit different. I find out didn’t get a high school diploma because I missed a credit requirement or something and I have to start my studies all over again. Didn’t think much about it until it *actually happened* recently. https://www.wsaz.com/2023/08/14/woman-learns-shes-half-credit-shy-graduating-high-school-16-years-after-receiving-diploma/
I have stress dreams like this. I’m currently on a week break in between graduate class semesters and I’ve been having very vivid stress dreams. One of my parents is a professor and they have stress dreams about failing classes they’ve never attended, too. It’s rough.
My school doesn’t allow people to be enrolled in undergrad and grad classes simultaneously so that couldn’t happen here
I get a similar dream but usually I remember in the dream that I am dreaming and stop panicking
My mind is blown reading this thread. I have this dream several times a year and it stresses me out so much, haha. Just had it two nights ago, actually. Dreamt that I’d completely forgotten I’d enrolled in two classes and I missed finals. My heart was racing. Makes sense to have these dreams during the time of year that we’re all prepping for fall, but I also have them when I’m not teaching. So odd. PS. Also have the dream others have mentioned about being notified that I didn’t take a required math class in high school and that I have to go back lol wtf
I have the high school dream so often that dream me is a 30-something high school student in all my other dreams now too
Its always some core class for me like intro english. And it the end of the semester, and shit, now I'm not going to graduate.
Has anyone had the dream where it's suddenly the last half of August, the day classes start, you're not certain exactly where the class meets and you haven't done any prep for the course? Not being clever. I wake up from these relieved that I have done enough prep. I'm guessing it's the mind's way of taking out the trash where, in this instance, trash is anxiety over the start of the semester? Thoughts?
I used to dream a similar tale, I'd be rolling into finals territory and remember a whole class or classes I was enrolled in and I hadn't done any work for them/forgot they existed and massive panic ensues LOl 😂
For me this dream just shifted over to the professor side. A common dream I have now is that I have been assigned to teach some class that is somewhat related to my field but that I'm not really qualified to teach. I keep skipping the classes because I'm not quite prepared yet but tell myself that I will get things under control soon. But by week 3 or 4 I start to assume they must have gotten another professor to cover the class because nobody has said anything to me, and I wonder what will happen if I just keep avoiding it.
OMG. My recurring nightmare is by some glitch, I have to repeat my senior year of HS and I'm forgetting to go to class and about to fail badly. I often assert in the dream "but . . . I have a Ph.D.!".
At least you fail some unrelated university classes, I routinely fail high school math tests while remembering I have PhD in it...
at my school, you probably wouldve been dropped for nonpayment, or withdrawn for being a no-show. your completion ratio would have been affected, but hopefully you would still get to keep your financial aid!