From the Vault: School Dreams

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 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, 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. 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, 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 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. 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 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.

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 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 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 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. 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, 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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

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. 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 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 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. 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.

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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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

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 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

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 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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.

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 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

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

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 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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

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

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

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

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 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 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, 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, 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, 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 to be like literally everywhere, various programs, various services, objects that you find uh in bathrooms and subway stations, We're probably on that as well. Wherever you get the podcast, the best thing you can do to help us is to just rate and review us wherever you have the

power to do so. If you can leave some stars you know on you know this program or that, or on a weird object in a bathroom, do so, leave a nice review and make sure you've again subscribe to not only this show, but our other show, Invention as well. Invention is a weekly exploration of human techno history, one 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 Mind is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works.

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