Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time to go into the vault for a classic episode
Speaker 1: of the show. This one originally aired on August nineteen,
Speaker 1: and it's about that dream where you're back in school. Yes,
Speaker 1: this is a fun one because this was exactly a
Speaker 1: year ago. Uh. And also it's just a really it's
Speaker 1: a really fun episode that we can all relate to.
Speaker 1: I think we got more listener mail about this episode
Speaker 1: than maybe any other, at least in the past few years.
Speaker 1: Would wouldn't you agree, Like everybody wanted to tell us
Speaker 1: about school dreams. Yeah, and I want to hear about him.
Speaker 1: And yes, if you're hearing this episode for the first
Speaker 1: time or the first time in exactly one year, I
Speaker 1: want to hear about your updates, so and hear about
Speaker 1: your new dreams. You're walking down the hall alone, your
Speaker 1: shoes squeak against the hard, seamless flooring. You have a
Speaker 1: sense of otherworldly dread, a feeling of looming over a
Speaker 1: drop so far you can't see the bottom, but you
Speaker 1: can't remember why where are you? You can't remember that either,
Speaker 1: The feeling of dread is absolutely oppressive. It's weighing you down,
Speaker 1: as if to pull your soul into the underworld. But
Speaker 1: wait that feeling. It's not dread weighing you down. It's
Speaker 1: a backpack full of heavy textbooks. You're in your high school.
Speaker 1: You're alone in the hall because you're late for class.
Speaker 1: That's right now, You remember you had to go back
Speaker 1: to high school because it turns out you never actually finished.
Speaker 1: There was an error with the paperwork in the high
Speaker 1: school office, and somehow they let you graduate even though
Speaker 1: you never took the final exam in your hardest class,
Speaker 1: Russian calculus. You have to go back and take the exam,
Speaker 1: and if you don't pass, you'll be stuck in high
Speaker 1: school forever. Let's see what do we learn in Russian calculus?
Speaker 1: You can barely recall some vague cyrillic operating symbols. What
Speaker 1: was the division symbol? No time to think about it,
Speaker 1: You sprint to the classroom where they're holding the exam.
Speaker 1: Once you get there, you remember you're not the only one.
Speaker 1: Your next door neighbor, Jimmy, who's seventy four years old
Speaker 1: and illegally burns trash in a metal drum in his backyard.
Speaker 1: He also has to come back and take the Rustcal exam.
Speaker 1: Jimmy asks did you study? You did not? And that
Speaker 1: coffee shop barista with the Optimus Prime tattoo who you
Speaker 1: went on a date with a couple of years ago,
Speaker 1: they're here too, except now they're dating your childhood best friend.
Speaker 1: And who's administering the exam? That's right, it's your old
Speaker 1: rust Cal teacher, Christopher Lambert. Mr Lambert is asking everyone
Speaker 1: to take their seats. The panic rushes up from your
Speaker 1: gut into your throat. Is there any way out of this?
Speaker 1: Your hand bolts up. Mr Lambert calls on you. He says, yes,
Speaker 1: when is it? And the whole class turns to look
Speaker 1: at you, scrutinizing, crinkling their noses in pity and disgust
Speaker 1: ust at what they see. Then you realize you're not
Speaker 1: sitting at a desk, your pants are down, and you're
Speaker 1: sitting on a toilet in the middle of the classroom.
Speaker 1: Why would they put a toilet here? But no time
Speaker 1: to wonder about that. The class is laughing viciously at
Speaker 1: your shame, and Christopher Lambert is passing out the exams.
Speaker 1: You didn't bring a pencil, Sandra Bullock won't let you
Speaker 1: borrow one, neither, well Ken Griffey Jr. The test is starting,
Speaker 1: Mr lamb Berry Yell's eyes on your own paper. A
Speaker 1: single tooth falls from your mouth and lands on page one.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. A production of
Speaker 1: I Heart Radios has to work. Hey you, Welcome to
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Land
Speaker 1: and I'm Joe McCormick. And obviously you can tell that
Speaker 1: we are going to be talking about the one, the only,
Speaker 1: the high school horror Dream. Yeah, yeah, the which is
Speaker 1: really the worst. I have a lot of disdain for
Speaker 1: the high school Dream because then I'll get into more
Speaker 1: of it later. But but basically, it's like when you
Speaker 1: when you go when you dream, you can do anything,
Speaker 1: You can be anything, Like this is the place where
Speaker 1: lucid dreaming is possible, where all the boundaries can dissolve,
Speaker 1: and all the limitations that you know in the waking
Speaker 1: world can just be swept away and you can ascend
Speaker 1: into the skies of being of pure light and energy. Uh.
Speaker 1: But instead, what does our mind do when we slumber?
Speaker 1: So much of the time we have dreams like this,
Speaker 1: we you know, dreams that are just cobbled together out
Speaker 1: of the mundane garbage of our lives into a form
Speaker 1: that does not fill us with wonder or even even terror.
Speaker 1: You know, like for a lot of people, it fills
Speaker 1: them with terror. It depends they're sort of like they're
Speaker 1: sort of like low stress, low anxiety, high school dreams.
Speaker 1: But when you read a lot of people's accounts of these,
Speaker 1: they're like they wake up in a cold sweat, they're absolute,
Speaker 1: really petrified. This is something that I think is worth
Speaker 1: discussing a little bit because when you when when you
Speaker 1: look at what the surveys of what people have dreamt about,
Speaker 1: and there are different ways of conducting those surveys, so
Speaker 1: it's there's going to be a fair amount of variety
Speaker 1: there anyway, and it's a lot of it's also going
Speaker 1: to depend on who you're talking to. As we've discussed
Speaker 1: on the on the show before, a lot of studies
Speaker 1: like this, especially psychological studies, they're often conducted with college
Speaker 1: students and small sample sizes, and that brings a you know,
Speaker 1: it brings a lot of limitations and what kind of
Speaker 1: life experiences the dreams then are are ascending from. But
Speaker 1: but I was looking around a little bit thinking about Okay,
Speaker 1: it seems like we're often not talking about nightmares. There's
Speaker 1: like a variety of dream that is, you know, filled
Speaker 1: with anxiety or even dread without actually really breaking over
Speaker 1: into this room that we think of as the domain
Speaker 1: of nightmares. I guess that depends on the definition you'd use,
Speaker 1: because I've always thought of nightmares as including dreams that
Speaker 1: are not like, uh, you know, like immediate physical peril.
Speaker 1: I mean, there are violent dreams that people obviously think
Speaker 1: of as nightmares. Like one of the most common themes
Speaker 1: of bad dreams is being chased by something. Right, but
Speaker 1: they're you know, a huge number of people's really bad
Speaker 1: dreams are about like are about like public embarrassment or
Speaker 1: about things like having to go back to school and
Speaker 1: face some kind of scrutiny or examination. Yeah. But yet
Speaker 1: when you look at the surveys to deal with the
Speaker 1: content of nightmares, we don't often see, you know, a
Speaker 1: real definite place for the school dream. For instance. Uh.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen thirty psychologist whole See case and conducted
Speaker 1: a survey of nightmares and found their contents to be
Speaker 1: uh like twenty seven percent dealing with animals seven percent,
Speaker 1: being chased at death and murder at and then it
Speaker 1: goes down to home and family falling and then miscellaneous
Speaker 1: nineteen percent, accidents seventeen percent. And you see similar things
Speaker 1: with other surveys. There's a Harvard psychologists Didra Barrett's survey
Speaker 1: and it UH said like being chased with seventy two
Speaker 1: death of family members in for six percent following UH
Speaker 1: monsters and or animals made it on their thirty three
Speaker 1: percent war, violent crimes, natural disaster. And then there's been
Speaker 1: others that the kind of match this this sort of thing,
Speaker 1: you know, it's like physical harm, physical danger. Um. I
Speaker 1: did find a two thousand UH inten German study from
Speaker 1: the Central Institute of Mental Health and Mannheim, Germany that
Speaker 1: said nightmares okay, forty percent following being chased feeling paralyzed,
Speaker 1: but also twenty four percent being late to an important event,
Speaker 1: which definitely lines up with a lot of what we're
Speaker 1: talking about here, because so often the content is I
Speaker 1: am I am late to the exam right um, or
Speaker 1: I have I've let time slip away in advance of
Speaker 1: the them. So yeah, it is going to come back
Speaker 1: to like, how do we classify nightmares, and what do
Speaker 1: we think of when we think of nightmares, and then
Speaker 1: after we've had one of these school dreams, how we
Speaker 1: classify it. But I think there's a strong case to
Speaker 1: be made that that what we're talking about here isn't
Speaker 1: a nightmare. And yet at the same time, I myself
Speaker 1: find myself at times wishing it were, because at least
Speaker 1: if it were a nightmare, it would it would feel
Speaker 1: more more potent, you know, it would feel like it's
Speaker 1: maybe doing something that it's cathartic in a way that matters,
Speaker 1: instead of being this just ridiculous rehearsal for a thing
Speaker 1: that is that is not going to occur. You know. Well,
Speaker 1: this brings us back to a question, of course we're
Speaker 1: gonna have to touch on throughout the episode today, and
Speaker 1: unfortunately we're not gonna be able to answer in the
Speaker 1: definitive way. But like, what is the purpose of the
Speaker 1: content of dreams, if anything to be in with I mean,
Speaker 1: do that we know that like sleep and dreaming are
Speaker 1: obviously important for some kind of neurological function, but we
Speaker 1: don't know if the contents of dreams are important, and
Speaker 1: we don't know if they are important why are they important?
Speaker 1: What do they do right? And and yeah, once you
Speaker 1: you can sort of divide into two schools of thought
Speaker 1: where it's either the contents of the dreams do matter
Speaker 1: or they don't um and when you get into the
Speaker 1: various arguments for them actually mattering, and then you get
Speaker 1: into various divisions on the show, we've discussed the writings
Speaker 1: of Frederick van Eden in the past too wrote Study
Speaker 1: of Dreams, and this was a book that outlined lucid dreaming,
Speaker 1: for instance, but you know he covered everything from you know,
Speaker 1: ordinary dreams to symbolic dreams, demon dreams and more so. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it depends on it depends on which view you're taking.
Speaker 1: Either the content matters or it doesn't, and then if
Speaker 1: it if it does matter, There's so many ways to
Speaker 1: unpack that. But I would say, actually, whether the content
Speaker 1: of dreams matters or not, like whether what you dream
Speaker 1: about actually has adaptive value in life or there it's
Speaker 1: just sort of like a byproduct of something going on
Speaker 1: in the brain. And you know, what happens in a
Speaker 1: dream has no effect on life or no positive effects
Speaker 1: either way you split it. It's an interesting question to ask,
Speaker 1: why do we dream about the things that we dream about,
Speaker 1: like why is that the content, whether it's adaptive or not. Well,
Speaker 1: it comes back to the nightmare thing, like so much
Speaker 1: of the time, I feel like the school you know,
Speaker 1: sometimes we we do have dramatic events, uh in our
Speaker 1: school history, but a lot of times we don't. And
Speaker 1: yet that's the stuff that still remains like so potent
Speaker 1: to us in our dreams. And I think that can
Speaker 1: be the irritating thing, Like why am I still dreaming
Speaker 1: about this thing? This thing is solved high school, you
Speaker 1: know is solved. You know, it's I've I've I've been
Speaker 1: out of it for you know, decades. Why do I
Speaker 1: still return to it in dream? What is it about
Speaker 1: that experience or that time in my life? Maybe the
Speaker 1: plasticity of my mind that that makes that the the
Speaker 1: the the fabric of my dreams. Yeah, So I want
Speaker 1: to talk about a few common variations. I think just
Speaker 1: from what I've read anecdotally, I've not been able to
Speaker 1: find a rigorous study characterizing the nature of school anxiety dreams,
Speaker 1: but I have found some informal collections of anecdotes, and
Speaker 1: based on that, and I have to say, some very
Speaker 1: common dreams are Uh, I have to go back to
Speaker 1: high school and finish a class or a test that
Speaker 1: I never finished, and I don't know in like, there's
Speaker 1: the knowledge that I am an adult, but I have
Speaker 1: to go back and do this. Yes, I've definitely done
Speaker 1: that one. I've I've definitely had that one, and I've
Speaker 1: done that one to a certain extent because I went
Speaker 1: back after college and taught high school at the high
Speaker 1: school that I attended. Wow, so I kind of had
Speaker 1: this weird like I was kind of living the dream
Speaker 1: the worst way possible. And so I will sometimes have
Speaker 1: dreams that are I'm sometimes a little vague as to
Speaker 1: whether I am dreaming about teaching high school and my
Speaker 1: old high school where I'm dreaming about attending the high school,
Speaker 1: or having to go back and take a class that
Speaker 1: I didn't finish, that sort of thing. What age where
Speaker 1: you when you were teaching at that high school. I
Speaker 1: mean I was fresh out of college, so I was, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: so that might come back later when we talk about
Speaker 1: different periods of life in the formation of memories, that
Speaker 1: that might be relevant to your case here. Um, so
Speaker 1: another thing that is extremely common. In fact, just before
Speaker 1: we started off, we were talking to our producer today Seth,
Speaker 1: and he was saying that he's had this dream. I've
Speaker 1: had this dream. I've talked to tons of people who
Speaker 1: have had this dream, who have been out of school
Speaker 1: for decades, and it's this. It's the end of the semester.
Speaker 1: There's a class that I forgot I was enrolled in
Speaker 1: and I haven't been going to and now I suddenly remember,
Speaker 1: Oh no, I'm in this class and I've got to
Speaker 1: go take the final exam. Yeah. I I have done
Speaker 1: that one as well, where I missed the deadline to
Speaker 1: drop the class and or just forgot that I had
Speaker 1: it entirely. And and it'll like summon like a mental
Speaker 1: calendar of when your classes are, and it's generally usually
Speaker 1: something like, oh, it was a Wednesday more in class,
Speaker 1: and it was it was sandwich between two other classes,
Speaker 1: and somehow I just missed it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: get the exact same calendar effect. Actually, I think about like, oh,
Speaker 1: I wasn't going because I was doing this other thing
Speaker 1: at this time of the week, and I just forgot
Speaker 1: repeatedly that I had this class. Now I suddenly remember,
Speaker 1: and uh, and my chicken is cooked. I mean, they're like,
Speaker 1: there's no way I'm going to pass this exam. Other
Speaker 1: common things that I found reported are difficulty with navigating
Speaker 1: the school environment, so being in high school or being
Speaker 1: in college and being unable to find the classroom, so
Speaker 1: you're like running around, you're late for the class and
Speaker 1: you're trying to get there, but you can't find the
Speaker 1: door or you can't get in. I've never had that one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's weird. How you know that our experiences will
Speaker 1: will vary like that one I've never had. I I've
Speaker 1: never had a problem getting to the dream classroom and
Speaker 1: a dream. Another big one I think is school based embarrassment,
Speaker 1: dreaming about like being embarrassed in front of a class
Speaker 1: room or in front of classmates, or like having to
Speaker 1: give a presentation in front of a class and not
Speaker 1: being prepared or being embarrassed some way, see I. I
Speaker 1: The weird thing is I don't have any of those
Speaker 1: related to actual class experiences. But but since I was
Speaker 1: in um theater, I do have dreams related to productions
Speaker 1: that I haven't learned my lines. Yes, I have the
Speaker 1: same dreams I did theater in high school. And yeah,
Speaker 1: I I very frequently dreamed that I suddenly remember, oh, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm in a play that's opening tonight, and I haven't
Speaker 1: looked at my lines yet. How about this one? This
Speaker 1: is a weirder one, but I feel like I hear
Speaker 1: this one pretty often. Uh, sort of blending of school
Speaker 1: with the workplace or with the current friend group, and
Speaker 1: blending of like old teachers with bosses. You get this, No, No,
Speaker 1: I don't really get that one. I would get get
Speaker 1: the blending of workplaces to a certain extent, because I'll
Speaker 1: have dreams where I didn't actually fully quit my previous job.
Speaker 1: I'm kind of like kept one foot in it somehow,
Speaker 1: but I have to keep going back to do like
Speaker 1: the bare minimum to still be a part of the
Speaker 1: previous employers. And and I always just kind of analyze
Speaker 1: that as being like it's about fear of change. It's
Speaker 1: about fear of like entering any kind of new phase
Speaker 1: in life. This dream rehearsal in which I never actually
Speaker 1: leave any step behind, you know, where I'm managing to keep,
Speaker 1: you know, one foot on every stone that traverses the
Speaker 1: pond or the stream. I can absolutely see that. Yet,
Speaker 1: general dreams about not just school, but school being one
Speaker 1: example of like being drawn back into a previous stage
Speaker 1: of life, like you can't, you can't move on to
Speaker 1: the next thing. Yeah, yeah, all right, well maybe we
Speaker 1: should take a break and then when we come back
Speaker 1: we can analyze the school dream a little more. Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back. So you know, in our cold open you
Speaker 1: added the bit about tooth falling out and seth our producer.
Speaker 1: He he mentioned that he has had dreams in which
Speaker 1: is his teeth fall out and the school anxiety dream.
Speaker 1: I've never had a dream where or teeth fall out,
Speaker 1: which really which is is weird because I mean, like
Speaker 1: dental anxiety has It's kind of part of my upbringing
Speaker 1: because you know, my father was a dentist. You know,
Speaker 1: I remember like seeing slides of awful teeth when I
Speaker 1: was a kid, and and even today like I'll you know,
Speaker 1: I'll you know, I you know, I'm I'm I'm getting older.
Speaker 1: I think about my my dental health and I and
Speaker 1: I regularly read articles that are discussing correlation between dental
Speaker 1: hygiene situations and say things like Alzheimer's. So, I mean,
Speaker 1: there's plenty of of of fuel there for the fire,
Speaker 1: and yet that never happens in my dreams. That's interesting. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, the teeth falling out dream goes way back,
Speaker 1: and you've got all kinds of like freudy intakes on
Speaker 1: that and stuff where it's you know, it's metaphorical for
Speaker 1: some kind of like wish or anxiety that you have.
Speaker 1: Weather dreams are actually metaphorical in those ways, I think
Speaker 1: is an unsettled question. But but but it's certainly they
Speaker 1: could be. And if they are, yeah, it could be
Speaker 1: that maybe you don't really suffer from the underlying anxiety
Speaker 1: that drives whatever causes people to think about their teeth
Speaker 1: falling out in dreams. Maybe the teeth falling out in
Speaker 1: dreams is not normally about teeth. That that's if the
Speaker 1: like metaphor theory of dreams is true, which we don't
Speaker 1: know if it is. And my hand has fallen off
Speaker 1: in a dream before, but never the teeth. Well, so
Speaker 1: back to the school dream. We know, at least anecdotally
Speaker 1: just from talking to people, that it seems pretty common
Speaker 1: for adults who have been out of school for a
Speaker 1: long time to keep having these recurring dreams about school.
Speaker 1: Uh even you know, I've I've talked to people who
Speaker 1: are in their sixties who still have these dreams, which
Speaker 1: is not I'm not looking forward to that for the
Speaker 1: rest of my life. But oh well, uh, and so
Speaker 1: the question is like, is it really all that common? Again?
Speaker 1: We are going to be dealing here with the problems
Speaker 1: that are common to all kinds of psychological studies, which
Speaker 1: is often there is not enough data about say the
Speaker 1: entire world, and you know, we get like the weird focus, right, yes,
Speaker 1: weird science, but not in the fun way of weird
Speaker 1: standing for Western educated and from industrialized, rich and democratic countries,
Speaker 1: just meaning that like in lots of studies, especially lots
Speaker 1: of psychological studies, there is a disproportionate representation of people
Speaker 1: in that sort of category a lot of times because
Speaker 1: these studies are done at like western research universities, and
Speaker 1: that brings up the potential criticism. Well, of course, all
Speaker 1: these people were having dreams about exams and exam anxiety.
Speaker 1: They are college students, right, There's not any mystery at
Speaker 1: all why college students would be dreaming about uh, school
Speaker 1: and college and exams. And of course studies find that, yes,
Speaker 1: college students do dream about that a lot. Just one example,
Speaker 1: a two thousand three study in the journal Dreaming found
Speaker 1: among Canadian university students. The dreams about the category known
Speaker 1: as school teachers and studying were the fourth most common
Speaker 1: typical theme of dreams out of a list of like
Speaker 1: fifty something common themes of dreams. But they're Canadian college students.
Speaker 1: That just doesn't seem very surprising at all. But studies
Speaker 1: including like older populations have also found that school dreams
Speaker 1: remain very common. Just to cite one example from the
Speaker 1: journal Dreaming in by Mathis Shreddle and gorerits called frequency
Speaker 1: of typical dream themes in most Recent dreams and online study.
Speaker 1: They had a big sample collected online. It was two thousand,
Speaker 1: eight hundred and fifty three participants. They did a survey
Speaker 1: about the themes of recent dreams people had, and this
Speaker 1: was based on a common dream theme inventory that has
Speaker 1: like a list of commonly cited themes and you can
Speaker 1: check off which ones apply to you in recent dreams. Uh.
Speaker 1: And they said that their findings were mostly consistent with
Speaker 1: other studies showing prevalence of dream themes in different populations.
Speaker 1: They ended up ranking dream themes by prevalence and dream
Speaker 1: about school teachers and studying was actually the fifth most
Speaker 1: common category of dreams by theme overall, I found that
Speaker 1: the entire list of ten was kind of interesting. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I mean six is arriving too late, which could be
Speaker 1: very very well be couched in the same area. Right,
Speaker 1: And if you have a dream that you know more
Speaker 1: than one applies to, you can check both. Right, So
Speaker 1: let's do the whole list. Number ten swimming, number nine
Speaker 1: being physically attacked, number eight, a person now alive being dead.
Speaker 1: Number seven a person now dead being alive, Number six
Speaker 1: arriving too late, number five school teachers and studying number four,
Speaker 1: sexual experiences, number three being chased or pursued. Number two. Oh,
Speaker 1: this one hits home trying something again and again. And
Speaker 1: then number one flying or soaring through the air. See
Speaker 1: you know this list just it almost just makes me
Speaker 1: enraged because people are people are having flying dreams is
Speaker 1: their number one. Lots of people have flying dreams. I
Speaker 1: do not have two flying dreams I can remember i've
Speaker 1: and then in sexual experiences, I've rarely have a sexual dream,
Speaker 1: and now I should have. I should add the caveat
Speaker 1: here that I remember. Big aspect of dreaming is you know,
Speaker 1: to what extent are we able to then recall what
Speaker 1: we have dreamt of? When we wake up. I hate that.
Speaker 1: The thing I definitely identify with most on here is
Speaker 1: trying something again and again, like the dream about how
Speaker 1: you just need to do something that should be really
Speaker 1: simple and you should be able to do it, but
Speaker 1: you try and you try and you try and you
Speaker 1: can't and it just doesn't work. Yeah, or like like
Speaker 1: one of my most recent dreams I will share with
Speaker 1: everyone is that that I was trying to move a
Speaker 1: horse across um uh you know, like from one city
Speaker 1: to another in a horse trailer, and Glenn Danzig was
Speaker 1: helping me, or he was supposed to help me, but
Speaker 1: he was absolutely no help at all, and it was
Speaker 1: super frustrating and I kept having to to reattach the
Speaker 1: horse hitch um which is or the hitch on the
Speaker 1: trailer with the trailer hitch, which was you know, which
Speaker 1: was extra frustrating because like nothing in this dream had
Speaker 1: anything to do with what with with like actual real
Speaker 1: life struggles, like I'm not dealing with horses or horse trailers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well that's that's interesting stuff again because sort of like
Speaker 1: the school dream, Now it's not relevant to your life
Speaker 1: at this moment, So what's going on? Is it a
Speaker 1: metaphor for something that is relevant to your life in
Speaker 1: this moment or is it just a sort of like
Speaker 1: thought pattern or memory patterns being retrieved for no good reason.
Speaker 1: And and I guess the perplexing thing and about anything
Speaker 1: like this is that since we we have this fan
Speaker 1: of this fantastic ability to to make connections and things
Speaker 1: and even like random assemblages, you know, we can come
Speaker 1: up with the story if we we analyze it enough,
Speaker 1: we can say like, oh, yeah, well this is like
Speaker 1: clearly the horse represents this, and the trailer represents this,
Speaker 1: and Glenn Danson represents that. Uh, you know, you can
Speaker 1: come up with a version of it that makes sense.
Speaker 1: Then does that have anything to do at all with
Speaker 1: the the origin of the dream exactly? I mean that
Speaker 1: might be a personally useful story to come up with.
Speaker 1: I can see how it could be useful for for
Speaker 1: people to interpret their dreams, even if the interpretation they
Speaker 1: come up with actually has nothing to do with the
Speaker 1: cause of those thoughts arising in their head while they're sleeping.
Speaker 1: But I do agree this is I joke about it
Speaker 1: being enraging, but it is a very interesting list. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like swimming dreams swimming is on here. I never,
Speaker 1: I rarely have ever had a swimming dream, don't Hi.
Speaker 1: I swim every morning if I can. Uh. And yet
Speaker 1: it doesn't really factor into my dreams at all. But
Speaker 1: okay to mention it again. Back to our our subject.
Speaker 1: This theme, known as school teachers and studying is number
Speaker 1: five the fifth most common theme of dreams uh in
Speaker 1: people responding to this massive online survey. But simply checking
Speaker 1: a box that says a recent dream included themes of
Speaker 1: school teachers are studying doesn't really tell you all that much, right,
Speaker 1: Like it would be useful to have more granular detail
Speaker 1: what exactly usually happens in the most common school based dreams?
Speaker 1: What level of school does it apply to? Are the
Speaker 1: dreams good or bad? I imagine they're probably mostly bad,
Speaker 1: But I don't know. I've got you know, hunches. But
Speaker 1: has anybody actually looked into this? And so the answer
Speaker 1: is I was not able to find a rigorous study
Speaker 1: characterizing the school dreams like this, but I did find
Speaker 1: at least one informal survey of of these dream experiences,
Speaker 1: so to look at that. I was reading a blog
Speaker 1: post about this on Psychology Today by the Boston College
Speaker 1: research psychologist Peter Gray, and he had obviously noticed the
Speaker 1: same trend about adults having school dreams long after they
Speaker 1: leave school or graduate. And by the way, the post
Speaker 1: had a great deadpan title that does give away the findings,
Speaker 1: but it's worth reading. It is the dream of school
Speaker 1: and none of the dreams are good. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: I can I certainly can't think of a good school
Speaker 1: dream that I've ever had. They've all been at the
Speaker 1: very least boring and tedious, if not, you know, anxious. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Gray used his online platform to conduct an informal
Speaker 1: survey about the nature of school dreams and their emotional valence. Uh. Now,
Speaker 1: remember again, this is an informal survey, not scientific data,
Speaker 1: so there's no attempt to randomize participation or blind respondents
Speaker 1: about the purpose of the inquiry, So there could be
Speaker 1: selection effects biasing the responses here. But with that strong
Speaker 1: caveat in mind, what you know, if it's a starting place.
Speaker 1: What did he find in this survey? Well, first of all,
Speaker 1: he looked into what was the level of school that
Speaker 1: people dreamed about. By far, the most common was high school.
Speaker 1: Seventy three percent of dreams involved high school. Uh. And
Speaker 1: these responses are going to add up to more than
Speaker 1: because people can report dreaming about more than one level
Speaker 1: of school. But like high school seventy college thirty percent,
Speaker 1: elementary school twelve percent, middle school seven percent. Where the
Speaker 1: dreams good or bad? As alluded to in the title,
Speaker 1: the dreams were overwhelmingly bad on a one to five scale,
Speaker 1: with one being very pleasant and five being very unpleasant.
Speaker 1: Nobody rated any recurring school dream better than three. Almost
Speaker 1: all dreams were rated to four or five. Common emotions
Speaker 1: identified by the dreamers in these dreams include anxiety, panic, shame, embarrassment,
Speaker 1: and helplessness. It sounds about right. He found that the
Speaker 1: dreams continued for decades after people graduated from school, and
Speaker 1: they were extremely common in people in their thirties and forties,
Speaker 1: but much older people still reported them. Uh, and back
Speaker 1: to the question of like, what are these dreams like?
Speaker 1: What actually happens in them? Plenty of things happened, but
Speaker 1: he found the two most common among the people who
Speaker 1: replied to his survey were missing classes all term and
Speaker 1: therefore being likely to fail. That seems like it goes
Speaker 1: right along with this, you know, this archetype we talked
Speaker 1: about at the beginning and then second being unable to
Speaker 1: find the classroom. This is the one you were less
Speaker 1: familiar with, right, Robert, Yeah, I don't think I've had
Speaker 1: this one, but it totally makes sense. I mean, I
Speaker 1: mean I remember from real life at times having that issue,
Speaker 1: like trying to find a classroom or trying to find
Speaker 1: where the classroom is moved temporarily. I mean, it seems
Speaker 1: like the kind of thing I would have dreamt about,
Speaker 1: but I did not. Well. Another interesting thing that I've
Speaker 1: found when people collect these anecdotes of people's school anxiety
Speaker 1: dreams is that they're not only common among people who
Speaker 1: struggled in school or actually experienced feelings of helplessness and classes.
Speaker 1: It seems they're very common at least also maybe even
Speaker 1: more so among people who were successful as students and
Speaker 1: who did well in their classes. Yeah. I mean, you
Speaker 1: just because you're good at something doesn't mean you're you're
Speaker 1: stress free about it, right, Right, But I guess now
Speaker 1: we've got to turn to the question of why why
Speaker 1: these school dreams? For decades after people leave school, you
Speaker 1: might be in your fifties, you might be in your sixties,
Speaker 1: and you're still having the dream where you forgot you
Speaker 1: were enrolled in Russian calculus and you've got to show
Speaker 1: up and take the exam. Why does that happen? Why
Speaker 1: does that take hold of our brains? Why are we
Speaker 1: not instead replacing those dreams with dreams about things that
Speaker 1: are affecting us in the present. I think it's he
Speaker 1: has a great question, and my my sort of gut
Speaker 1: answers it would be that we live very boring lives,
Speaker 1: you know, Like, like I I legitimately want I did
Speaker 1: a little looking around for this, and I couldn't find
Speaker 1: a good source. But my my immediate question is, like,
Speaker 1: how would this kind of data match up with people
Speaker 1: who instead of going to college, uh, like we're were
Speaker 1: drafted into the military. Like what would this data look like,
Speaker 1: say from you know, more from like a World War
Speaker 1: two era, um, you know, a group of subjects. I
Speaker 1: was really curious about that too. And like, as we said,
Speaker 1: you know, the data we have seemed to be affected
Speaker 1: by like the selection problems that exist in a lot
Speaker 1: of current psychological literature. But yeah, if there is data
Speaker 1: like that out there somewhere and somebody knows about it,
Speaker 1: please send it our way. I would love to see that,
Speaker 1: to see if that's different. Likewise, this would be a
Speaker 1: great area to hear from just our listeners, like what
Speaker 1: has you what's your experience if you especially if you
Speaker 1: didn't if if you were, say drafted into the military
Speaker 1: or join the military, like right after high school, Like
Speaker 1: what do you have more off do you have more
Speaker 1: like boot camp dreams or military dreams or even combat dreams,
Speaker 1: or do you have more high school dreams? Like I wonder,
Speaker 1: wonder like what has the most potency? I mean, I
Speaker 1: wonder also our school dreams common among people, say who
Speaker 1: didn't go to high school. Maybe if you only have
Speaker 1: an elementary school education and you know, you went on
Speaker 1: straight to a career after that, do you still have
Speaker 1: anxiety dreams about elementary school? Right? Or do you have
Speaker 1: dreams about like the trials that take place at that
Speaker 1: the high school age stage of your life, like entering
Speaker 1: the workforce or you know, whatever happened to you know,
Speaker 1: fill those years. Yeah, I wish we had more information
Speaker 1: about that, But that's a very interesting question. All right.
Speaker 1: On that note, we're going to take a quick break,
Speaker 1: but we'll be right back. All right, We're back so
Speaker 1: in trying to answer this question of like why school
Speaker 1: anxiety dreams seem to be so common among people who
Speaker 1: went to high school or college but have been long
Speaker 1: out of it, you know, like the high school is
Speaker 1: not something that's still a pressing concern for them, and
Speaker 1: yet they have nightmares about it, or at least anxiety
Speaker 1: dreams of out at frequently. Yeah, like you can forget
Speaker 1: everybody's name that you went to high school with based
Speaker 1: with these dreams. I was reading an article by the
Speaker 1: science writer Stephanie Poppas about this and and she led
Speaker 1: me to some interesting thoughts that I don't think I
Speaker 1: would have connected to automatically, but this was this was cool.
Speaker 1: So so she's looking at the same question. And one
Speaker 1: idea she brings up that I thought was a very
Speaker 1: interesting possibility is an association with what's known as the
Speaker 1: reminiscence bump. Robert, were you familiar with this? Okay? I
Speaker 1: wasn't either, but um, but it makes sense based on
Speaker 1: some other things I've read. So the reminiscence bump is
Speaker 1: the tendency for people to have better recollection of stuff
Speaker 1: that happened when they were in their late teenage years
Speaker 1: in their early twenties, and better recollection of that stuff
Speaker 1: than any other point in their lives. So, for example,
Speaker 1: older adults, you take somebody maybe in their fifties or
Speaker 1: sixties or seventies, they will seem to have greater access
Speaker 1: to more vivid memories with more accuracy at the referring
Speaker 1: to things that happened at the time there were maybe
Speaker 1: sixteen to twenty five, and less access to memories with
Speaker 1: less accuracy dealing with things both before and after this.
Speaker 1: And many studies have demonstrated the reminiscence bump. I think
Speaker 1: this is a well established phenomenon. Well, I could see
Speaker 1: that being a you know, a direct factor, and thats
Speaker 1: then for sure, Yeah, it's possible. So we'll continue to
Speaker 1: think about this. But to look a little bit more
Speaker 1: closely at the reminiscence bump, if you want to imagine
Speaker 1: basically the quality or salience of memories throughout the life
Speaker 1: in general, Uh, the quality and quantity of autobiographical memories
Speaker 1: is is not equal across time, and there's sort of
Speaker 1: an s curve in lifetime memory retrieval. For example, adults
Speaker 1: tend to remember very little from before the age of
Speaker 1: five or so. This is sometimes referred to as childhood amnesia.
Speaker 1: Memories increase from here, and you get this curve going
Speaker 1: up where the older you get, the more memories you
Speaker 1: have from that period, and it peaks sometime around the
Speaker 1: early twenties, like late teens, early twenties. That's that's the
Speaker 1: olden time for having the most memories that are most
Speaker 1: easily retrieved. And that it's also a reason perhaps that
Speaker 1: you like so much with the nostalgia that is marketed
Speaker 1: at you is going to be marketed at things from
Speaker 1: that period of your life. Oh yeah, actually, uh now
Speaker 1: I don't remember who made this point, but somebody I
Speaker 1: was reading made this point. I'm sorry, I can't remember
Speaker 1: the name. Pointed out the connection between this and the
Speaker 1: cycle of remakes and films that there seems to be
Speaker 1: about a twenty year lag, and that would tie in
Speaker 1: with like the stuff you remember coming out when you
Speaker 1: were twenty years old, you being ripe to like go
Speaker 1: engage in nostalgia for that or even participate in making
Speaker 1: the remake when you're forty interesting. Okay, But anyway, after
Speaker 1: this increase in in the retrieval of memories from around
Speaker 1: the early twenties, they did, your ability to retrieve memories
Speaker 1: declines again from later periods, so older adults remember less
Speaker 1: from their thirties and forties. Though, of course, no matter
Speaker 1: what age we are, we tend to recall recent events better,
Speaker 1: So whatever wherever you are in the age range, the memory,
Speaker 1: of course from the last few years will usually be
Speaker 1: pretty good. So no matter what your age is, if
Speaker 1: you're after you know, thirties or forties, you're going to
Speaker 1: have kind of an s curve with it peaking up
Speaker 1: again for more recent things. So we can definitely see
Speaker 1: how this could be related. It could be relevant to
Speaker 1: the lifelong power of school related terror and it seems
Speaker 1: to line up especially with the observation that the majority
Speaker 1: of school related dreams are not about like elementary school,
Speaker 1: but they tend to be about high school and college.
Speaker 1: So that could be because school anxieties are common for
Speaker 1: people who attend high school and college in their late
Speaker 1: teens and early twenties, and these themes are especially salient
Speaker 1: and easy to access in memory for dream content. But
Speaker 1: I guess this forces us to ask the question, if
Speaker 1: the reminiscence bump plays a role in the prevalence of
Speaker 1: school related dreams, why do we have a reminiscence bump
Speaker 1: in the first place like why would we remember this
Speaker 1: part of our lives better than other parts of our lives.
Speaker 1: And there have been a lot of hypotheses to explain
Speaker 1: this pattern. I think it's something that it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's not fully answered yet, but there's a lot of
Speaker 1: research and thought about this. An early idea was that
Speaker 1: maybe this is just the time of life when like
Speaker 1: the brain is physically most adept, it's you know, your brain,
Speaker 1: is it optimized, high potential, it's making memories best than thosemies.
Speaker 1: Those memories are easiest to retrieve later. Well. One one
Speaker 1: possibility that I think ties directly in with this that
Speaker 1: you know, I'll come back to you later on, is
Speaker 1: that this is a time period this is the teenage brain.
Speaker 1: And uh we've talked about the teenage brain on the
Speaker 1: show in the past about how it is it is
Speaker 1: wired a little differently like the different there are different
Speaker 1: priorities for the teenage brain, for instance, with making social connections. Uh.
Speaker 1: And you know, from an evolutionary standpoint, like that is
Speaker 1: there because you would need to make connections with new people,
Speaker 1: you would need to branch out and uh and and
Speaker 1: become a part of other groups and it would be
Speaker 1: necessary for your survival. So like the teenage brain is
Speaker 1: wired for this passage into a new phase of life.
Speaker 1: Uh so, yeah, that could be part of it for sure. Well,
Speaker 1: I want to come back to that in a second,
Speaker 1: because who's the who's the personality that you need most
Speaker 1: importantly to make a connection to for social relevance. It's yourself, right,
Speaker 1: that's like identity formation period. So so we'll come back
Speaker 1: to that in a minute. Uh there's another explanation that
Speaker 1: seems to have gained some credence after the initial thing
Speaker 1: about maybe the brain just being good at making memories. Then, um,
Speaker 1: it has to do with the nature of life in
Speaker 1: late teens in early twenties. Maybe we remember this period
Speaker 1: best because for many of us, this is the period
Speaker 1: when life is filled with the most variety and novelty.
Speaker 1: Remember when we talked about the sort of the psychological
Speaker 1: dilation of time. Experiences that feel like they're taking the
Speaker 1: longest actually take up the shortest time in our memory,
Speaker 1: and they sort of collapse because these are the mundane, boring,
Speaker 1: grinding experiences. An our waiting in line for something feels
Speaker 1: like it takes forever, but it takes up almost no
Speaker 1: space in your later memory. Meanwhile, a novel experience that
Speaker 1: you've never done before. It's very strange and challenging to
Speaker 1: you goes by in an instant in the moment, but
Speaker 1: then in your memory it takes up this expansive character.
Speaker 1: And thus the faster your time seems to go by
Speaker 1: in the present, the more time you seem to have
Speaker 1: had to experience life in your memory. Yeah. To the
Speaker 1: prime examples of this are frequently, of course, a vacation,
Speaker 1: and ultimately that's one of the great things about of
Speaker 1: a vacation, because you've you've changed the way you're interacting
Speaker 1: with novelty in your life. Uh. The darker example, though,
Speaker 1: it would of course be a traumatic occurrence, where it
Speaker 1: is it is also impacting your life in a novel way.
Speaker 1: But in both cases, those can be things that where
Speaker 1: it just seems like time is super sped up in
Speaker 1: the moment, like the things are just rushing past you
Speaker 1: and then it's over. But then when you think back
Speaker 1: that time is way stretched out. It represents more life
Speaker 1: than the you know, the week before that, where there
Speaker 1: was there was just a mundane work week. Yeah. Another
Speaker 1: example of this is freaking one's wedding if you've had
Speaker 1: a wedding ceremony like it's it's it's really become kind
Speaker 1: of a trope, right that it will it will just
Speaker 1: fly by. You'll barely have a chance to experience it
Speaker 1: in the moment, but of course it will be this
Speaker 1: thing that you think back to, uh, you know, for
Speaker 1: the rest of your life. Right, And this does seem
Speaker 1: to go along with some psychology and neuroscience. It's well
Speaker 1: known that the brain essentially encodes stronger memories of novel
Speaker 1: experiences than of routine ones. You're gonna have a weaker
Speaker 1: memory of things that you've done a million times and
Speaker 1: just happened to do again the other day, then of
Speaker 1: something that was really unusual and new for you. Just
Speaker 1: for example, I was reading an article about the reminiscence
Speaker 1: bum by Katie Waldman and Slade, and she pointed out
Speaker 1: that there was a night study that found that nine
Speaker 1: percent of vivid life memories concern unique or first time events.
Speaker 1: That's a lot, yeah, I mean that would make sense.
Speaker 1: I mean, just if you look at memories just to
Speaker 1: sheer like cataloging of events or occurrences that may prove
Speaker 1: useful later, like the ones that are gonna be highlighted
Speaker 1: or this would never happened before. Well, we better we
Speaker 1: better mark this one. We better make sure this one's
Speaker 1: nice and vivid, because this will this could be useful
Speaker 1: if this thing were to happen again exactly. But this
Speaker 1: theory has some challenges to explain the reminiscence bump. For example,
Speaker 1: a big problem a lot of the memories that people
Speaker 1: report experiencing through their reminiscence bumps. So you ask somebody
Speaker 1: to say, Okay, you know, what are the things you
Speaker 1: you know remember in your life and make a list
Speaker 1: of autobiographical details. A lot of them are gonna be
Speaker 1: in their say, early twenties or late teens or something.
Speaker 1: But a lot of these experiences are not, in fact
Speaker 1: novel experiences. They'll remember something mundane from that time period. Well,
Speaker 1: like when I think back to high school, I don't
Speaker 1: think I have any definitive memories of specific tests that
Speaker 1: I was stressed out about. You know. It's it's like
Speaker 1: these these dreams seem to be occurring from just a
Speaker 1: generalization of of of anxiety that I was feeling at
Speaker 1: the time. Yeah, and so Waldman's article points actually to
Speaker 1: something that I found really interesting, and this comes back
Speaker 1: to the point you were making earlier that we're both
Speaker 1: talking about earlier. Another theory that's become popular and gained
Speaker 1: some traction in explaining the reminiscence bump is that the
Speaker 1: reminiscence bump occurs in the late teens, in early twenties
Speaker 1: or its peaks then, because this is a time full
Speaker 1: of memories that people come to see as self defining.
Speaker 1: These are autobiographical narrative experiences that come to mind when
Speaker 1: we're asked to think about our identity, who we are.
Speaker 1: And so experiences and and studies have shown this experiences
Speaker 1: that we see as self defining occupy a privileged place
Speaker 1: in our memory, even if they occur at other stages
Speaker 1: of life. But apparently it's just very common for self
Speaker 1: defining experiences to be clustered in your late teenage years
Speaker 1: and in your twenties. Does that make sense? Yeah? Absolutely, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean this is this is this this time of
Speaker 1: of expansion in our life, this time of stepping from
Speaker 1: one one stone across the stream to another. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: so normally when we think about self defining memories, we
Speaker 1: want to drift towards the positive, right, And so if
Speaker 1: you are asked to make a list of like I
Speaker 1: am statements about yourself, So, you know, make list ten
Speaker 1: statements about you saying like I am this, I am that,
Speaker 1: And then after that, I say, take every one of
Speaker 1: those I am statements and make a list of specific
Speaker 1: autobiographical memories you have that that that illustrate this fact
Speaker 1: about you that you are this thing. People will tend
Speaker 1: to make lists of a lot of things from their
Speaker 1: like teenage in early twenties period. But studies find that
Speaker 1: that people can have un if people have self defining
Speaker 1: experience at other periods in their life, they will remember
Speaker 1: these other periods in their life very well also. Uh So,
Speaker 1: so it could just be that there's this unfortunate like
Speaker 1: timeline coincidence, coincide, coincidence coincidence that the timeline of when
Speaker 1: you're in high school and when you're in college happens
Speaker 1: to line up pretty well with the timeline of when
Speaker 1: you're figuring out who you are and making memories that
Speaker 1: will last the rest of your life to help you
Speaker 1: make sense of your life and your in your narrative arc. Absolutely, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think those two line up, you know, rather nicely. Now.
Speaker 1: But then again, uh in that article I was talking
Speaker 1: about by Stephanie Poppas. She also interviews Michael Shreddle, who's
Speaker 1: in charge of the sleep laboratory at the Central Institute
Speaker 1: of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany. Yeah, he's the same
Speaker 1: author of that and the nightmare survey that referred to earlier. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and one of the studies I referred to earlier survey.
Speaker 1: And Shreddle does not agree with the reminiscence bump theory.
Speaker 1: He he thinks that dreams stem from the brain trying
Speaker 1: to deal with problems it's facing in the present, perhaps
Speaker 1: by way of analogy. And and he tells her quote
Speaker 1: the examination, dreams are triggered by current life situations that
Speaker 1: have similar emotional qualities. And I mean, obviously, you know
Speaker 1: he's the expert on this. I'm not, but I have
Speaker 1: some issues with that because if this is true, I
Speaker 1: feel like, in a way, it still doesn't answer the question. Like,
Speaker 1: let's say that all school anxiety dreams are actually functioning
Speaker 1: on a kind of unconscious system of metaphors. It's the
Speaker 1: brain working over current problems and obstacles by presenting a
Speaker 1: strange metaphorical scenario that has similar emotional qualities. We don't
Speaker 1: know that's the case, but let's assume that's the case. Yeah, Like,
Speaker 1: for instance, you're not looking for a classroom in which
Speaker 1: you have to take an exam, but perhaps you're looking
Speaker 1: for something. Perhaps you're not concerned about failing a test.
Speaker 1: Perhaps perhaps like you're concerned about being judged in one
Speaker 1: fashion or another. Exactly right. Yes, So if that's the case,
Speaker 1: the question remains, why is school so prevalent as the
Speaker 1: metaphor that the brain chooses even later in life. If
Speaker 1: for some reason it must default to a metaphor, why
Speaker 1: not one from more recent experience. Why aren't all the
Speaker 1: fifty year old's anxiety during tames about school or replaced
Speaker 1: with dreams about other anxiety inducing situations from the past
Speaker 1: month or the past year of their life? Why go
Speaker 1: back to this time? So I feel like that that
Speaker 1: could be true, but it wouldn't necessarily answer the question
Speaker 1: of why school in the dreams? Now? Is? I believe
Speaker 1: we mentioned earlier that dream anxiety dreams about exams in school.
Speaker 1: You know, we've mostly been dealing about them after the fact,
Speaker 1: you know, five, ten, twenty forty years later. But the
Speaker 1: reality is that we also see these dreams occurring, you know,
Speaker 1: in real time before the tests occur, being experienced by
Speaker 1: actual students. Yeah, and that that's the time when it
Speaker 1: totally makes sense. It's more just the mystery of why
Speaker 1: they occur later in life. But maybe by understanding what
Speaker 1: role they serve in the moment, you could better understand
Speaker 1: why they linger in the brain so much. Right. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: this brings brings us to this this broader question, right,
Speaker 1: could could anxiety dreams actually be adaptive? Are they helping
Speaker 1: us in one way or another? Are the contents of
Speaker 1: them helping us in some way? Right? And and this
Speaker 1: again we come back to sort of the division about
Speaker 1: dreams and how they work. Does the content matter at all?
Speaker 1: Or or or the contents of the dreams sort of
Speaker 1: like the scap that has been extruded by by the
Speaker 1: like the psychic digestive system of the sleeping mind. Uh. Anyway,
Speaker 1: and this we end up, you know, coming back to
Speaker 1: those big questions. I'm reminded of an interview that we
Speaker 1: conducted with the Dr marn Surf years ago on our episode.
Speaker 1: I believe it was the one about the Nine dream
Speaker 1: Worlds of Frederick penn Eden. And you know, we talked
Speaker 1: about there being five different theories out there, predominant theories
Speaker 1: about dreams that range from importance about dream content that
Speaker 1: range from importance to non importance, you know, ranging from
Speaker 1: it like it's like a defragmentation of the hard drive,
Speaker 1: you know, a race and keep memories, assorting dreams as
Speaker 1: emergent narrative another one. Um. And other extreme examples include,
Speaker 1: you know, the idea that our our brain is looking
Speaker 1: at things that we suppressed during the day, or that
Speaker 1: the brain is using the dream to simulate futures for
Speaker 1: us so that we can act better in the waking
Speaker 1: world and um and yeah, so we're looking around, and
Speaker 1: there are some interesting cases to be made regarding these
Speaker 1: anxiety dreams as being perhaps even being simulations for something
Speaker 1: that's coming, at least dealing with stress ahead of an event.
Speaker 1: And uh So. One of the papers the look that
Speaker 1: here was will students pass a competitive exam that they
Speaker 1: failed in their dreams? This was published in in Consciousness
Speaker 1: and Cognition was by Arnold at all So The authors
Speaker 1: point out that most students in medical school dream about
Speaker 1: an exam before the exam, and they primarily dream of failure,
Speaker 1: being late, not being able to answer the questions on
Speaker 1: the exam, etcetera. And yet, unlike you know, with typical anxiety,
Speaker 1: dreaming of an exam seems to predict higher performance on
Speaker 1: the exam. So their theory was that it's like your
Speaker 1: dramatics nation of high concerns during the dreams, maybe training
Speaker 1: the brain for the challenges to come, so kind of
Speaker 1: like let's just hit him with a bunch of like
Speaker 1: the brain is just hitting you with a bunch of
Speaker 1: worst case scenarios so that you'll be like better emotionally
Speaker 1: prepared for something more middle of the road. That's really interesting.
Speaker 1: I mean, I do wonder if that's true, Like just mechanically,
Speaker 1: how does it work, you know, literally, how does it
Speaker 1: increase the brain's ability to actually deal with the test
Speaker 1: to have the dream about it. Yeah, it also sounds
Speaker 1: like like maybe, you know, we don't want to personify
Speaker 1: the brain. The sleeping brain is being like a you know,
Speaker 1: a team of little bitty scientists that are deciding how
Speaker 1: they're gonna what they're gonna roll out, what kind of
Speaker 1: programming you presented is with Because it also seems like, well, okay,
Speaker 1: if we could go back to the idea that dreams
Speaker 1: don't matter, and this is just simply, uh, the dream
Speaker 1: content doesn't matter, and that this is just a you know,
Speaker 1: a reverberation of our of our concerns during the day.
Speaker 1: You know, if you're st stout, maybe you're I mean,
Speaker 1: that's what we do with mental time travel. We run
Speaker 1: these scenarios in real time and we think, oh my goodness,
Speaker 1: what if I don't get there in time? What if
Speaker 1: I failed? What if I don't get good enough good
Speaker 1: night's sleep before the exam? Uh it makes sense that
Speaker 1: if you're worrying about there in the day, you're gonna
Speaker 1: worry about that at night. Uh. So it becomes, you know,
Speaker 1: difficult to really characterize the purpose if there is one
Speaker 1: of the dream content. I also looked at a paper
Speaker 1: titled Inception the Exam Dream is Real by Alan J. Oxford,
Speaker 1: the third published in a pin State Law Review. This
Speaker 1: one is also fun because there were a lot of
Speaker 1: Morpheus quotes what in the in the paper? But but
Speaker 1: it was it was very well written and uh and
Speaker 1: of course it springs, as the title suggests, from similar
Speaker 1: situations with law students. And the paper is is lengthy
Speaker 1: and wrestles with the viewpoint that while the you know,
Speaker 1: the function of sleep and dreaming is vital for our survival,
Speaker 1: you know, essentially restoring our energy, arguably to fragging the
Speaker 1: hard drive. The content of our dreams, you know, may
Speaker 1: very well be without purpose. Again, according to some of
Speaker 1: the models, Uh, you're the junk in your dreams may
Speaker 1: simply be there because it's the same junk you've been
Speaker 1: wrestling with all day, all week, all month as you
Speaker 1: prepare for your tests. So I can't help but return
Speaker 1: to this basic scenario of human survival that we've been
Speaker 1: discussing here. You know, these dreams again are often relating
Speaker 1: to periods of great stress and vulnerability, and they are
Speaker 1: in a paper tiger sense of things, not unlike states
Speaker 1: of birth. You know, a process is in place, but
Speaker 1: there is a potential for things to go very wrong.
Speaker 1: There's a risk. And in many models of the afterlife,
Speaker 1: the same scenario is also present in transferring to the
Speaker 1: realms beyond death. Uh. Take Tibetan Buddhism, for instance, one
Speaker 1: goes through a mental rehearsal, meditation, and practice so as
Speaker 1: to ensure one's dying consciousness moves safely through all eight
Speaker 1: stages of death to the death point. Confusing but you know,
Speaker 1: in many ways enlightening state that may last for many days. Oh,
Speaker 1: I think about the ancient Egyptian sort of rehearsals for
Speaker 1: the progress through the afterlife. Yeah, I think very similar scenario.
Speaker 1: You know. It's something where it's like the the journey
Speaker 1: is stressful, the journey is like birth, and there's a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff that can go wrong if you're not
Speaker 1: prepared for it. And uh, yeah, we see this in
Speaker 1: various other spiritual models as well. So yeah, I think
Speaker 1: that you know, for for most of human history, the
Speaker 1: teenage years, a little before, a little after, you know this,
Speaker 1: this was a time in which we were making these
Speaker 1: big jumps out into the world. You know, we're and
Speaker 1: even in our own lives like so much of the
Speaker 1: time teenage years and then in college years if you
Speaker 1: go to college or entering the workplace, etcetera. Like these
Speaker 1: are dream These are periods of time in which we
Speaker 1: have increasing responsibilities for ourself and our own destiny, our
Speaker 1: own fate. However you want to uh, you know, you
Speaker 1: want to package it and uh, you know, so it
Speaker 1: makes sense that we would come back to this period
Speaker 1: time and time again in dream. You know, either the
Speaker 1: reverberation of the anxiety or just the reverberation of the metaphor,
Speaker 1: you know, and uh, it's it's uh you almost want
Speaker 1: to think of it as this this thing in our timeline.
Speaker 1: It is just so potent that it's you know, it's
Speaker 1: like sending waves back into into the past and into
Speaker 1: the future at the same time. Yeah, well, I feel
Speaker 1: like the question is still unanswered. But I think the
Speaker 1: thing that we've talked about today that appeals to me
Speaker 1: the most as an explanation is probably the the it's
Speaker 1: it's tying into what you're saying now, like the self
Speaker 1: identity narrative of the reminiscence bump. I think is is
Speaker 1: a It seems like a very good candidate to me.
Speaker 1: That like, if if there is a general context for
Speaker 1: what's happening in your life at a time when you're
Speaker 1: making a lot of memories that are highly relevant to
Speaker 1: what what you think about yourself and who you think
Speaker 1: you are, then those memories in that context are going
Speaker 1: to be highly salient and in memory and will be
Speaker 1: retre eaved effortlessly throughout the rest of your life, even
Speaker 1: maybe necessarily when you don't want them to be. And
Speaker 1: then of course, as you're saying, like the test, just
Speaker 1: the test is a perfect metaphor in a way, like
Speaker 1: it just does fit with so much else that's going
Speaker 1: to happen throughout our life as a metaphor. Uh because
Speaker 1: because essentially, like every major struggle is in a way
Speaker 1: a test, right, and you know, an important test in
Speaker 1: high school or college. Uh, it's it's it's a perfect
Speaker 1: example of a paper tiger, right because you're not going
Speaker 1: to die if you fail an exam, but certainly failing
Speaker 1: important exams and tests can have, you know, some some
Speaker 1: pretty major effects on your life, or at least you
Speaker 1: know they can contribute to major twists and turns in
Speaker 1: your timeline, or at least adults will definitely tell you
Speaker 1: that it contributes. That's because that's the narrative you're hit with,
Speaker 1: like this is an important test, like this could this
Speaker 1: could you know, impact whether you get into college or not,
Speaker 1: or if you have to go work at the at
Speaker 1: the you know, the the shoot tongue fact tree where
Speaker 1: they just make the tongues for shoes. Uh you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, so you know a lot of it we
Speaker 1: can blame our parents for I agree, Oh, I didn't
Speaker 1: mean to blame our parents. I just mean that, I mean,
Speaker 1: I think it is worth this should maybe at least
Speaker 1: tempt us to think differently about what school should be. Like.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying, you know, I'm not saying I know
Speaker 1: everything about education or you know about what's best for
Speaker 1: for high school age kids and what's the best way
Speaker 1: for them to learn. But if high school is causing
Speaker 1: these high school in college are causing these horrible you
Speaker 1: know memories that that plague people the rest of their
Speaker 1: lives and they wake up in a cold sweat thinking
Speaker 1: about tests, I don't know that that could at least
Speaker 1: maybe be a sign that like there's something structurally about
Speaker 1: the high school experience that could be different. Maybe. But
Speaker 1: then I again, I also just wonder if you're going
Speaker 1: to have something similar no matter what you're going through
Speaker 1: at that age. Ye. Again, I wish we had some
Speaker 1: great data looking at individuals who go directly into military
Speaker 1: service or or you know, directly into the workforce, and
Speaker 1: or in those cases you're just going to see different
Speaker 1: dream content stemming from the same life period. But you know,
Speaker 1: who knows, maybe in the future will have more robust
Speaker 1: data to go from on this, All right, well there
Speaker 1: you have it. Uh. School dreams something that I think
Speaker 1: everybody can relate to. Um, And if you can't relate
Speaker 1: to it, we definitely want to hear from you about that.
Speaker 1: So basically, no matter you know what your experience, you
Speaker 1: probably have something to share here. UM. I'm not one
Speaker 1: of those you know, some people you know will say, like,
Speaker 1: you know, you never want to hear about somebody else's dreams,
Speaker 1: like somebody's else's dreams are always boring. I strongly disagree.
Speaker 1: I always want to hear about other people's dreams because
Speaker 1: even if they are boring, it's telling like you're learning
Speaker 1: something about the the inner space that defines someone else. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then half the time, though it's really weird and
Speaker 1: uh and interesting in its own right. So right into us,
Speaker 1: we'll tell you how to do that. But in the meantime,
Speaker 1: if you want to listen to other episodes of Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind, you'll find the Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind dot com. Where else can you find it? Oh,
Speaker 1: like everywhere wherever you get podcasts these days, which seems
Speaker 1: to be like literally everywhere, various programs, various services, objects
Speaker 1: that you find uh in bathrooms and subway stations, We're
Speaker 1: probably on that as well. Wherever you get the podcast,
Speaker 1: the best thing you can do to help us is
Speaker 1: to just rate and review us wherever you have the
Speaker 1: power to do so. If you can leave some stars
Speaker 1: you know on you know this program or that, or
Speaker 1: on a weird object in a bathroom, do so, leave
Speaker 1: a nice review and make sure you've again subscribe to
Speaker 1: not only this show, but our other show, Invention as well.
Speaker 1: Invention is a weekly exploration of human techno history, one
Speaker 1: invention at a time. Huge thanks as always to our
Speaker 1: excellent audio producers Sethan Nicholas Johnson and Maya Cole. If
Speaker 1: you would like to get in touch with us with
Speaker 1: feedback about this episode or any other, to suggest a
Speaker 1: topic for the future, to tell us about your dreams
Speaker 1: or your lack of school dreams, or or just to
Speaker 1: say hi, you can email us at contact at stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your
Speaker 1: Mind is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeart
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