Recurring Dream

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I graduated from college about two years ago, but I keep having recurring dreams about trying to retake courses in just about every level before college (elementary, middle, and high). Currently, I'm unemployed (laid off in January), but I'm trying to learn coding and stats on my own, to help me in a new internship I just got and in order to make myself more competitive in the job market. I'm hoping to seek an MPP starting fall of next year. And before anybody asks, no I am not naked in any of these dreams.

When it's a high school course, it's usually English, taught by a teacher who was always very hard, but was my first ever AP teacher and her class was honestly the first one I felt really significantly challenged by in a fun way. Else it's a science course, often chem or biology. I was challenged by those courses in a... less fun way. Usually, in dreams about high school, it's a dream about skipping class until the final exam and not being ready to take it.

More often, I'm retaking a middle school course. Unlike high school, I despised middle school with a passion. My (at the time) undiagnosed ADHD helped to tank my grades, I had moved just beforehand, and life generally was kind of in the crapper, with the combination of the move and my non-existent social skills wreaking havoc on my social life. Frankly, by the end of middle school, I had a small circle of three friends, one of whom got forcibly moved to a specialized school to work out emotional issues she was having, and the other two were redistricted so that they would go to one high school, and I would go to the other. I still believe that middle school was what caused me to be numbers and science-phobic, because when my grades crashed, those were the first to do so and the last to recover after I was finally diagnosed (see above in high school), and I think I convinced myself based on it that I was simply no good at that stuff. In middle school dreams, there may be a test, there may not, but the focus is more on a disconnect with the students, since I'm my own age (mid twenties) and the other students are middle schoolers. If there is a test, usually I decided to retake the course late and only in time for the test, which has the same practical effect as skipping class until the test.

I'm just trying to work through my feelings about this stuff a bit, so if anyone would mind helping out, I would really appreciate it.

I think this may be pretty common.
It may be linked to feelings of failure and general anxiety about the future (since you don't know where you'll end up, you can easily feel lost). This makes you vulnerable to negative memories, things you may never have dealt with but only endured. It'll probably go away once you feel more settled and fulfilled.

I also have those kinds of dreams, even though nowadays I'm often aware (or I start remembering during the dream) that I graduated and don't actually need to be there. It's a pretty strange experience when you know you're out of place, but some kind of fear still keeps you coming back anyway, maybe because you're not sure if you did actually graduate, maybe because you think you should be feeling different if you had (again related to feelings of failure, I think).

Yeah, that's the thing. I usually know in the dream that I graduated already. As I kind of alluded to, it's usually in the context of retaking the class. Geez, I hope you're right, though, that it'll go away soon. It makes me really depressed when I wake up because I like learning things, so negative dreams about school suck doubly for me because they're emphasizing negative things about something I love doing.

Truth be told, I really feel bad about not trying to take more numbers courses in school because it's biting me in the butt in the labor force. And I always felt a little inadequate moving away from math stuff because in elementary school I was really good at it. I just kind of convinced myself I suck at it and should avoid it after my grades collapsed in middle school (and my comparative skill with foreign language only played into that assumption. Foreign language was one of the few courses that never really had a large crash, if only because I finished most of the homework in the classroom before the day ended and was really good at tests). I'm trying to make up for lost time now, but it's still kind of frustrating that I wound up in this position to begin with. Part of the reason I want to get an MPP instead of an MPA is to try to make up for that, since an MPP is more numbers and stats focused than the more theoretical MPA.