Having nightmares about exams years after graduating? Here’s why

Saleem Ahmed, a seasoned teacher turned journalist, finds himself grappling with recurring dreams of his university days. 

In these nocturnal visions, he is often perturbed by scenarios where he is running late for class, sitting for the wrong exam, unable to find an exam hall, or frantically attempting to solve mysterious problems. Sometimes he even gets a blank question paper. 

Despite having bid farewell to student life over four decades ago after completing his Masters in 1984, Ahmed still finds himself transported back to those campus corridors, his heart racing upon awakening. 

"It's restless panic — an inexplicable sensation," he reflects.

Curiously, Ahmed's former student-turned-colleague, Alim Azij, aged 52, shares similar kinds of dreams. "I find myself wrestling with complex maths problems that leave me feeling utterly perplexed," Azij says. 

Seeking insight into the underlying significance of such dreams, we turned to Dr Mehtab Khanam, an honorary professor at the Department of Psychology, Dhaka University. But she confessed to experiencing similar recurring dreams — struggling with maths exams!

For Ahmed, Azij, and countless others, these recurring dreams serve as a curious reminder of the enduring impact of our formative years, lingering long past graduation day.

"Basically it comes from trauma, especially from those of childhood," said Khanam. 

The lingering impact of negative childhood experiences is often underestimated. While some may believe these memories to be relegated to the past, they often persist in the recesses of our subconscious minds, manifesting as what is known as adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). 

These experiences, stemming from various traumas — be they physical, mental or sexual — tend to linger, unlike our positive memories which may fade over time.

"Our brains have difficulty processing these negative experiences in the same way, leading to what psychologists term as 'unprocessed material' that may resurface unexpectedly later in life," said the psychologist. Even if the explicit memory of the traumatic event fades, the associated sensations or emotions can remain intact and resurface in myriad ways.

According to Khanam, academic pressure is another significant factor that can trigger memories of past classroom experiences. She discusses the case of a boy who felt robbed of two years of his life by his parents' relentless efforts to secure his admission into St Joseph Higher Secondary School.

During this period, he was subjected to extreme pressure, devoid of the joys of childhood, spending his days solely in coaching classes or gazing out of the window at children his age frolicking outside.

Excessive pressure from parents can profoundly impact a child's dreams and aspirations, influencing their trajectory for years to come. However, the effects may vary widely from person to person, with each individual processing and experiencing such realities differently.

"When we were trained in the field of psychotrauma, experts often recommended a process of reprocessing the brain to bring dormant memories to the conscious mind for reevaluation. This therapeutic approach can be instrumental in overcoming past trauma for some individuals," said Khanom. 

The Business Standard also spoke with Jane Teresa Anderson, a dream analyst and the author of The Dream Handbook. 

She explained that dreams process our conscious and unconscious experiences of the last 1-2 days and compare these to similar experiences from the past. Ideally, dreaming updates our mindset through this comparison process. 

Yesterday's experiences might contradict similar past experiences in which case — ideally — we awaken with a new, updated perspective (or resolution) on the issue in question.

More commonly, however, our dreaming brain defers to past experience. Our foundational beliefs and perspectives — those we learn early in life — are so concrete compared to yesterday's more fluid experiences. We tend to judge recent experiences as incorrect in comparison to the beliefs and perspectives we have held for so long.

Our school experiences can be intense and stressful for any number of reasons: bullying, pressure to pass exams, pressure to live up to parental expectations, feeling tested, feeling put down and much more. 

When our more recent experiences, those of the last one to two days, touch upon an issue that resonates with a similar issue from our schooling days, the dreaming mind may refer back to those times.

So, for example, if you are feeling under pressure to perform and it reminds you of a similar pressure when you were at school, your dream may picture you back at school, feeling that pressure. 

Each individual will have specific experiences or unresolved issues that come up in their dreams when triggered by similar issues in their current life. Rather than the reasons behind these dreams being different for different age groups, they are different for different individuals.

"However, schools and schooling have changed profoundly in recent decades, so people in their 60s may have unresolved issues that relate more to the type of schooling they experienced than people in their 30s," said the dream analyst.

Dreams process both our conscious and unconscious experiences, and so they provide us with insight into our unconscious programming, beliefs, perspectives, drivers, emotions and unresolved issues. "When you know how to look into a dream, you gain insight into your unconscious mindset and an appreciation of how your unconscious mindset can undermine or sabotage your conscious intentions," she suggested.

Dreaming of being unprepared for exams may relate to feeling (or fearing) being unprepared for a testing situation today. Such dreams are common for people who are usually totally prepared, people who fear being unprepared because of unconscious fears about what will happen if they're not perfect. 

Understanding such dreams can help people identify past experiences that cemented beliefs about needing to be perfectly prepared, for example. On the other hand, such dreams can also belong to people who are never well prepared! "So yes, these dreams are indicative of unresolved issues or ongoing stressors," she asserted.

Does understanding dreams help?

From a therapeutic perspective, Anderson explained, exploring and understanding dreams helps dreamers to understand themselves more deeply: to understand their conscious and unconscious mindsets and acknowledge how these affect the way they respond in life today. So step one is insight and acknowledgement. 

While this has therapeutic value, especially if explored with a professional dream therapist, greater therapeutic value is derived when dreamers work with the material of their dreams (the symbols, the narratives, the emotions) while they are awake, transforming elements of the dream to reflect the desired changes. 

This approach helps to reprogram unconscious beliefs, behavioural patterns, emotions or perspectives by engaging with the individual's unconscious mind using the language their individual mind used to express itself in the dream.

In an interview with The Atlantic, Deirdre Barrett, a dream researcher at Harvard University, explained that these dreams often emerge when the dreamer feels anxious while awake, especially concerning evaluation by a figure of authority. 

She has observed that individuals who harboured aspirations to perform or create music from a young age often encounter anxiety-inducing dreams not related to school, but rather to auditions — places where they initially engaged with authority figures who held significant power over their aspirations. 

Within each dream scenario, we revisit the environments where we initially tasted either success or failure, largely determined by our performance.