bad dreams about school as an adult?

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My school days are long past now, but I still have that kind of problem from time to time ... and in my own case, I think it is an overwhelming fear of an ultimate failure of some kind that freezes me up or "petrifies" me ... and then the nightmares come along and I wonder how I ended up in there and "trapped" once again ... and like with your dad and the police in your dream, nobody seems to know how to help me go in, how to help me do well or how to get me out of the entire mess.

If your avatar is actually a picture of you, I would say you appear to be a very capable young man who needs the simple encouragement of knowing somebody believes in you.

I do.

I was severely bullied at school (I'm not saying that for dramatic effect either) and as a result I have bad dreams mainly involving people trying to touch me, hurt me, set me on fire etc. On the non-bully side of things, I used to have dreams about running away from school with a teacher in hot pursuit. I would be in all the nearby estates trying to hide. I haven't had that one for years, since I left art college... It's not happening now at all.

Interesting I dream of the College issue frequently and have a friend who's now in College pop into my dreams aswell as the Psychology teacher I upset. So dreams about school definently!! ! Sadly due to bad school experiences (bullying elementary/bad behavior kicked out of College) I choose not to go to my little sisters school functions. Why bring up the bad memories of the past? Sadly going to there plays or whatever brings up those bad memories. Sadly the way I view it I have bad memories of Elementary school (being bullied etc.) and then school (the College issue). So bad school experiences BOTH WAYS!

I have not had any dreams about school in a really long while, but I will have waking flashbacks....sometimes when I am experiencing some sort of stress...some weird random memory from school will just pop into my head.

I'd have to look though my old dream journals to see if I have any school dreams written down..

It is the most awful recurrent dream I have. I really prefer the ones in which there are spiky monsters in my bed and I can't move over THAT. The really bad thing about those dreams is that I wake up very confused still thinking that I am going back to school.

I had those for a while, too. And they popped up out of nowhere when I was about 28, and lasted for about a year. I'd wake up crying. I would be confused too, until I realized that I wasn't in my room at home. Speaking of that, I frequently dream of being back in my old house, the one I lived in from birth to the end of HS, and there's always something spooky about it. It's not burned or looted or destroyed, but it's just spooky. I frequently dream of being back in my old room. I have dreams of my dad abusing me, which he did, and usually in the dream he's making good on his threats to kill me and I'm daring him to do it, and he does.

That's fascinating. It's as if it's not natural for humans to be educated, and there's a constant fear of being revealed as a fraud or unable to measure up to the artificial standards of the system. If it wasn't for education and learning, we'd still be living in caves as hunter-gatherers, but it seems that the human proclivity for educating ourselves with information we didn't personally discover is fundamentally troubling to some part of our collective unconscious.

The modern school system is meant to break the child and make him/her into a good little worker bee for the state. It works in most cases, but it seems that the process of being broken is so traumatic that there's a fear of being forced to repeat it. I was abused from the time I was very little (early toddler) so I have never NOT known a time when I was not being abused by SOMEBODY to "break" me. And it worked, I am dreadfully afraid of offending anybody in any way lest I get pistol whipped. I am constantly apologizing for myself.

I constantly imagine that the police are after me, because my dad always told me that he was gonna have the corrupt local sheriff haul me off to jail where I'd spend the rest of my days. A Yolo County cop was following me, and I thought he was after me so I pulled over, and he walked up to my car and asked if I needed help. I asked him if I had done something wrong, and he just shook his head and said "Man, you are PARANOID!" Yolo County cars are the same colors as the sheriff cars where I grew up, you see. Sutter County uses a similar scheme, except it's not so green, so it worries me less. I worry less about black and white cars. Green and white always makes me nervous.

I dream of my dad following through on his constant threats to kill me. Sometimes I dream that the multitudes of people he said hated me are there too. Even now when I live with my parents he occasionally hits me for something I did. I'm 35!

Most of school was hell for me, so I was glad to be out. I don't have dreams about what I went through, but there is a dream I've had recently that relates to school.

When I was in high school, my parents forced me to take a class I didn't want to take. It's not that I wasn't interested in it, it was because I had the teacher before and she wasn't a good teacher and often picked on me, so I didn't want to deal with her again. However, my parents signed me up for it anyway.

About a month into it, I was having problems and my parents realized I was right and decided to try and get me out. They met with the principal, then with the teacher, and there was no problem with my dropping the class, but I had to transfer to another class in order to do so. One class was overloaded and another class the teacher thought a student like me would find the material too easy, so it would cause problems with the other students, so she wouldn't take me in. The principal then told my parents because of this, nobody was getting out of the class at all. Shortly after this, another student said she was told she could quit at midterm and when I passed this to my parents they insisted she was lying because the principal said nobody gets out.

Midterm came along and 5 people dropped the class and I was again told no because they all had F's in the class so they were allowed into a study hall because they wouldn't get credit if they stayed. In my dreams at either this point or the point early on when I was told I couldn't get out, I switch schools to somewhere I'm treated with dignity and respect, and my remaining time in school, 1 1/2 to 2 years, is much better. In real life, my parents just said I only had 1 1/2 years to go so putting me in a different school wasn't worth the trouble.

I did finally get out of the class though, because after talking with another teacher about it, my parents got proof there was a lot of favoritism in that school and they threatened to let me drop otu and get a GED instead of continuing for another year. At that point, the principal said I could drop the class, and I did. I hear the teacher wasn't happy, but that was just too bad.

I do sometimes still wonder how my life would have been different if I had transferred out, and if I really would have been treated better elsewhere.

I have had many of these dreams, the plot is that it is about 2 weeks from the end of the term. There is a class, usually not in my major, like English or History etc, I had on my schedule, and went to for a week or two, and then stopped attending and then forgot about, and in the dream I just remembered it. Also remembering at least one midterm has been missed, along with other assignments, and am panicing. It is past the drop a class deadline, and debating whether to grovel to the professor, or take an F 'like a man', or go to the front office and politely request a do-over citing my good academic record.

I am now 20 years out of college, and they are less frequent, but I had one about 2 weeks ago. I have found these sort of dreams common in both my AS and NT friends over the years, so we are not alone.

hiker7 wrote;

Exactly-Wow I wonder what Jung would have made of this? It's more of a common theme than I realized.

"Unprepared for the exam" is a common recurring dream:

http://www.lifetreks.com/web/cgi-script ... ecurring03

This is a good website, I wrote to her a dream I was having and she helped me - back in the 90s when her website was collecting dreams for her PhD. I have several other of the recurring dreams on her website.

I am definitely hard on myself and I "grade" myself on material that has not been presented.

Well I left school at 14 so it's only been 4 years but I quite often have bad dreams about things that happened to me in school. I read that it's a common dream for many people (AS or not) especially if school wasn't a good experience for you.

I clearly remember a dream when I was in elementary school-It was raining fractions. My father once had a dream he was surrounded by a gang of hostile parabolas.

I have those dreams too. In mine, for some unknown reason, I find myself back attending high school even though I've already graduated. They usually involve wandering around empty hallways in between class, and having to make my way to a class I always skip. And the worst part is I skip the class so much, I have no idea where it is.

I dont dream about my old elementary or high school days, but I do have waking random flashbacks once in a while. Because of HS, I never answer personal questions too much to my current college classmates.I don't want to tell them why cuz that would probably create bad vibes.I just keep my mouth shut about things.My instructors do not know about my ASD, but one of them does sense I am different from the rest in some way, but she can't figure out why. Whenever I get these flashbacks, I cancel it out by doing something to cause equal to or more distress to distract my mind such as switching to my real estate files and get my mind on real estate class.The rigor of real estate is less distressing than high school by 100 000 to 1.

I'm 35 and I still dream about school, usually things like other people have mentioned, forgetting books, being late for classes, etc. It's strange that I've now been working for longer than I was at school, but I never dream about workplaces.