In The Recurring Nightmare (Part 1 of 3), I revisited a nightmare I began having after the space shuttle Challenger exploded almost twenty years ago. In The Recurring Nightmare (Part 2 of 3), I wrote about the bear nightmares I'd have as a very young lad. Today, I'll revisit a recurring nightmare I started having later in life and had as recently as a few years ago.
I too suffer from the popular "I have an exam I completely forgot about and I'm in big trouble" dream. I began having this dream during my University of Toronto days, but it has occasionally popped up throughout the seven years since. In this dream, I remember that I'm enrolled in university classes that I never attend. I haven't submitted any essays and now there is a final exam that I'm completely ill prepared for. It's too late to drop the class and it appears I will fail. In this nightmare, I try to understand how it is I've enrolled in classes I totally forgot about. You see, it's not that I decided to skip these classes intentionally, it's that it completely slipped my mind somehow.
These damn dreams show up now and then and they seem so real I'm always delighted when I awake and realize it didn't really happen. I've read that these types of dreams are common, but I'm not sure what brings them on. Although I haven't had one in a while, I remember having the dream at least once in the past three years.
That does it for recurring dreams I've had throughout my life that I remember. My mom tells me a story about a series of dreams I had as a toddler where I'd awake in the middle of the night screaming that there were bugs all over me, but I thankfully have no memory of this. Bugs are gross.
