WHY ADULTS STILL DREAM ABOUT SCHOOL • • • • •   Kelly Conaboy investigated classroom-anxiety nightmares for The Atlantic in September 2022.  Here are some excerpts. I have a recurring dream.  It's the end of the semester, and I suddenly realize that there is a class I forgot to attend, ever, and now I have to sit for the final exam.  I wake up panicked, my GPA in peril.  How could I have done this?  Why do I so consistently self-sabota— oh.  Then I remember I haven't been in college in more than a decade. I suspect the school-stress dream is quite a common one.  Even among nerds. Deirdre Barrett, a dream researcher at Harvard University, confirmed my suspicion.  She rattled off a few common variations:  The dreamer has to rush to an exam after having overslept, or they can't find their classroom, or they prepared for an exam by studying the wrong subject, or they sit down for an exam and the text is in hieroglyphics.  "It's a really common theme," she told me, "for people who are far into adulthood, who have been out of school forever." Barrett explained that these dreams tend to pop up when the dreamer is anxious in waking life, particularly about being evaluated by an authority figure.  She's found that people who wanted to act or play music at an early age tend to experience anxiety dreams not about school, but about auditions — in their youth, that was where they interacted with the authority figures who could most easily crush them.  In each of these dream scenarios, we revisit the space where we first experienced success or failure based on our performance. To find out what my specific performance-based anxiety dream means, I went to Jane Teresa Anderson, a dream analyst and the author of The Dream Handbook.  What might be behind that scenario, she told me, is "feeling tested in life, feeling that you have to respond to other people's expectations," and feeling that I'm not meeting those expectations.  "So you think back to school." I was curious about whether there is also a primal reason for why people remain enrolled in night school until death.  "What is taught in school are skills that are necessary to do well in life," Barrett said.  If feelings of inadequacy prompt you to have an anxiety dream, and if that anxiety dream prompts you to study harder, you might just have a better chance of "surviving" AP calculus — or a big work presentation.  That, Barrett said, has "an evolutionary purpose." Still, if you'd like to defy evolution and finally graduate from dream school, Anderson has a method.  Immediately post-dream, while you're lying in bed, imagine the dream scenario again, but this time with a more calming outcome.  The example she gives is a teacher telling you that you've already passed the class.  You don't need to do this, they might say.  You're fine.  "And although that seems to be just changing the outcome of the dream," Anderson said, "it will actually change your mindset, whatever the situation is in your life that you're responding to." Being long graduated from school but only recently retired from work, I've noticed a change in my occasional nightmare about failing to meet the expectations of authority figures.  Now I dream that air time for the game telecast is rapidly approaching and I haven't prepared all my graphics.  Or perhaps I've gotten lost and haven't even been able to make it to the site.