Hi everyone!
I frequently have bad dreams about exams! Yesterday I dreamt that I had forgotten the date of my grade 8 flute exam (still ages away - I'll probably do it next spring) and was told that I had one day till the exam! I remember panicking, thinking how on earth was I going to learn the three pieces by tomorrow, realising that I couldn't do all the scales or the aurals, had no accompanist etc.!!! I ended up ringing the exam centre begging for another date in my dream; the whole thing was getting stranger by the minute! I had the same dream whilst preparing for grade 6!

Does anyone else have bizarre or frightening dreams about exams? Please share!
Charlotte

None about exams, but try my favourite performance anxiety dreams - I get them whenever my subconcious wants to remind me that I have something coming up for which I am not doing enough practise.

Dream 1: I think I am booked by an amateur (and therefore inflexible) orchestra to play, say, Beethoven's 4th piano concerto. I turn up to the venue for the afternoon rehearsal to discover that I was actually booked to play the 3rd, a work I last played years ago. OK, so I might be able to bluff and blag....if someone can find a score......

Dream 2: I turn up to the venue for the afternoon rehearsal having revised the correct concerto, but only half-way through. Revising the first half has taken several weeks; despite this, I am relying on the interval in between rehearsal and performance to revise the res. It gradually dawns on me that there is not enough time................

Boy, am I gald to wake up.

Steve

I don't get weird dreams. I just get the ones where I'm getting told my results and I've done badly or failed. And ones where I'm in the exam room and its all going badly- that could actually just be in real life not a dream

I don't have nightmares about exams exactly, but around exam time I do have the most bizarre dreams.

I have a recurring dream where I'm back at school, about to take my A level exams again, but only knowing what I can remember now. And, as my A levels were in History, Economics and Pure Maths, that's not a lot.

The one I have is that I'm back at university, it's the first week of term and I know I have to be at lectures, but I've completely missed the bit where i get the timetable... And then I'm not sure which classes I'm taking, but I know if I don't turn up to something soon I'll fail...

I get one of these too. I am back in school, trying to explain to my 'A' level History teacher why my essay is late. AGAIN.

She was scary

Should do your essays on time then!

I still get the exam dream-it's always my music history paper, I either sit down in the exam and realise I've forgotten to do any revision, or I realise a week before that my exam is next week!

Yes I've had dreams about exams but my most frequently recurring dream is forgetting to turn up to one of my school viola lessons and having to explain why! My viola teacher is really nice and not scary btw!

Thank-you Nat. As always, I can rely on your support

Actually, where I really suffered was during my days as an 'A' level music teacher. Imagine my feelings, lecturing miscreants on the importance of handing essays in (stuff the 'on-time', just 'in' would do; you understand, I am sure) with that little lot behind me.

'Uncomfortable' doesn't even begin to do it justice

Steve

Yes. I have a recurring dream in lecture for months on end and the official course work deadline has already passed and the unoffical "absolutely the last minute" deadline is about 48 hours away and I'm trying to work out whether there's any way i can actually get the work done and pass. Sometimes when i wake up it takes me several minutes to convince myself that actually i am 42 and haven't had any university deadlines for a long time!

I can analyse myself easily enough on this because in fact i did hardly any work in the fourth year of my BEd and i got a third.

At one stage it looked as if i had got rid of this dream and what enabled me to do that was doing an OU degree. That got rid of it for several years but it came back. Perhaps that's why I'm now working for a theology certificate, practising my viola and piano again with a view to doing exams I failed previously, and thinking about doing another OU degree ....

And one more thing, i still dream quite often about my old viola teacher, even though i haven't had a lesson with her for something like 14 years.

Liz

Oh yes. I can relate to that.

When I was teaching A level Psychology, my Head of Department threw an impossible work-load on the students, and berated me for not doing the same. I felt caught between two stool: I knew it was counter-productive being too harsh with the students (it was a Further Ed college so a lot of them only turned up when they felt like it), and I had some sympathy with them from my own procrastination with A level essays.

Sometimes when I gave them a little talk about the importance of handing their work in on time I had my fingers crossed behind my back.

Eeek, this is spooky, I just read this thread and suddenly remembered that last night I dreamed I had to resit my Additional Maths GCSE! I was bad enough at ordinary maths but was saved by four days of intensive training by my sister and did fine. But in my dream, it was doing it remembering from several years ago! Have now just consoled myself subconsciously that IT WASN'T REAL!

I tend to get exam/performance anxiety dreams a lot too, but the worst ones are the ones I get AFTER the event!? Even if they went well, they are sabotaged in my dreams to be utter shambles. Very odd and can take me a while to recall that that didn't actually happen like that....

yup...um the one where i was in my local swimming pool, and the examiner was holding my head down and telling me to play my scales but i couldnt because i couldnt breathe...that was such a bad nightmare...

Well after a month I am still waiting for my flute results so the other day I dreamt me and the girl I share a lesson with were both with my flute teacher and we had both failed with only like 60 points are something.

I'm glad I'm not the only one with bizarre dreams!

Well mine are normally about the guys that I'm having a crush on at that moment!
And they are always nice dreams where he makes me laugh / does the nicest things / we have fun together. Really far from reality though.
That or I'm falling down and wake up in bed with a bump. No particular scene, just that I fell.

Glad its not just me. Then you wake up feeling like you just bumped back down on your bed?

[quote=Subatomic_Star,Aug 17 2005, 07:28 PM]
[quote=violin-ann,Aug 17 2005, 07:05 PM]
That or I'm falling down and wake up in bed with a bump. No particular scene, just that I fell.

[/quote]

Glad its not just me. Then you wake up feeling like you just bumped back down on your bed?

[/quote

There is some scientific reason for the falling feeling isn't there-but I can't remember what it is!

The whole science behind dreams is fascinating. During dreams chemicals are released which prevent your brain from actually causing one to act out what one is doing in a dream - walking, for example. However, these chemicals are only so strong and if the desire to move is too strong some acting out can occur. The obvious symptom of this is sleep-walking, but waking up with a bump after falling is a good example of it too. Instinctively, when one is falling, one throws one's legs and arms around; if the falling occurs in a dream, the desire to throw one's limbs around is so strong that it can actually happen and wake oneself up - with a bump, as the instant one awakes, one's muscles stop moving as the perception of free-falling is no longer there.

If anyone has ever wondered whether cats dream: scientists isolated the chemical that causes muscle motion supression during sleep in cats and developed a counter-agent that was given to a number of cats. The results - during sleep, the cats ran around chasing imaginary animals, eating imaginery food and sitting on imaginary furniture

Wow, that's really interesting! I had a dream recently that I had been entered for a grade 1 flute exam and that I hadn't learnt the pieces or the scales (bearing in mind here that in real life I can't even get a note out of the flute!). Weird!

I don't really have dreams about falling, but quite often I'm running away from something/someone and then after a while my legs drag and I can't run as fast as I'd like! I hate that! No doubt there's a scientific explanation for that as well!

Quite often I have dreams that, if only I could remember every detail when I woke up, would probably make me a fortune as the outline for a thriller. They're based on a chase situation but there's always some sort of tracking or hiding involved as well with elaborate settings - a whole underground labrynth in one dream a few months ago, for example, and last night I was involved, with four men, in the hijacking of two helicopters. Only four of us ended up in one helicopter leaving one man on his own to hijack the second. We got ours OK after a nasty few moments where the men couldn't get the pilot out of his seat and I was trying to fly the helicopter - not knowing how - with it veering all over the place, looping the loop and approaching the ground too rapidly - but the pilot, despite being tied up, somehow managed to raise the alarm and we ended up on the run from a lot of military type vehicles that were firing on us from the ground and military planes closing in on every side.

Someone might have great fun analyzing me

I will not touch a drop of alcohol when I know I have to drive.

My favourite dream of all time happened years ago. In my dream, I was drunk at the wheel. I thought to myself, "I must stop. This is dangerous."

Then I thought, "No, hang on, this is a dream. I can do what I want" and drove like a maniac until I woke up.

Yay

I have dreams like that too, Liz. It's probably compensation for my boring, risk-free life!

Last night I dreamed that my sons got their exam results. Can't remember exactly what they got, but I know No 1 got a C for General Studies, and Bs for nearly everything else. No 2 got 4/20 for a Maths paper.

!

I get those weird falling dreams too, like you've just fallen a great height and woken up, but really you havent moved at all....

Can't say I am surprised, having watched cats twitch in their sleep, and that's kinda mean... but very funny!

My friend got her new cat a while back but kept waking up in the middle of the night to find that the cat had sat on her face!

I've just realised that my dream came true for No 1 (thankfully not for No 2).

and I suppose likewise the example where one dreams one is sitting on the loo ...

I can't help feeling that for some children who have problems with getting through the night dry this might be a factor.

It was with me....

hope I didn't reawaken bad memories!

I think I got over it.. thanks.

I get that when my body is trying to tell me to get up to go to the loo! I dream that I can't find a toilet, or that the toilet is just sitting randomly in a public place and that I can't go.....so I wake up and realise I don't go in my dream for a reason!

funny how the brain works!

I did! When I was waiting for my grade four results I dreamt that my teacher sent me this huge book with all her pupils results in, and I looked through all of them to find mine, and mine weren't in there, and so I'd failed! Argh! I was scared, luckily in real life, I passed! Phew!!

Has anybody ever had a dream when they know they are asleep. I did and it was really freaky. I was only about six but I knew I was asleep and then I felt myself fall out of bed. The next morning I woke in my parents bed and my dad said he came to pick me up because I fell out of bed. That's wierd though because I felt myself fall out of bed but nothing after that. And once I woke up and watched the rest of my dream. How bizarre!

I sometimes wake up from a dream, think, "I was enjoying that. Let's have some more", go back to sleep and carry on.

Maybe I only dreamed I woke up.

Who knows?

I hate dreams when you know you are asleep and want to wake up but you can't. I try jumping up and down and rocking from side to side (in my dream) but it never works. My brother says the answer is to think of fruit !

I dreamt once that I was standing in the middle of my bedroom looking at myself sleeping! How bizarre is that?? I wonder whether I was actually sleep-walking?

I used to dream that I was asleep and knew that I was asleep and I couldn't wake up- and I went round, asleep (in my dream) asking everyone to wake me up. When I did wake up in the dream, I got annoyed because I found that I really was asleep and I couldn't wake up...

I also used to sleep-walk, and have entire conversations while asleep...

I don't have dreams about actual exams though I always dream about getting really terrible results. I hate those dreams!

don't worry i had loads of nightmares about a competition in school - i hadn't learn the last page of the piece i was playing and it was on my mind a bit, i kept having nightmares that it was actually the day of the concert and i was in rehersals and didn't know the piece at all! so i sat down and learnt the last page, the nightmares stopped and i did the concert and loved it!