Why adults still dream about school

Years of dealing with anxiety painted a different picture of these events.

When I get really anxious, I've learned to notice it not because of how I feel, but because of what I think about. My mind does two things. It will either distract me with soothing ideas (video games, side gigs) or (like TFA) it will go full anxiety and I'll hyper-focus on anything in the past that made me feel helpless, angry, or afraid.

Anxiety manifests as exam dreams, resurfacing relationship issues suddenly, body image woes, or just constantly checking to see if I have my wallet.

There's a much simpler explanation that works for me. Your mind is trying to explain the signals it's receiving, and it is grasping at straws by surfacing memories that triggered similar signals. It's a byproduct of a correlation engine and that's pretty much it.

I understand the obsession with divining meaning in arbitrary shared experience, but if my 350,000 hrs of use has taught me anything, it's that the mind is an arbitrary, guideless storyteller.

There's actually quite a bit of research supporting this, it turns out.

> When am sufficiently stressed at work - a recurring dream I have is that I am in the exam room ready to take a test, but did not study or I have mixed up the dates and came prepared for the wrong subject.

Because my high school Biology course (A Levels in the UK) was divided into modules assessed throughout two years I came to the last exam pretty sure that I didn't have to score many marks to get the grade I was aiming for.

I ended up in a weird situation where my instinct was to prepare really well but, in practice, I should skimp on revision for Biology and concentrate on subjects that weighted the end-of-year exams higher.

The strategy worked out - I hit what I was aiming for in Biology and in the other subjects. But that whole very tactical approach so went against my character that, to this day, anxiety dreams manifest about not having done the work for that specific exam. Often they're further exaggerated (e.g. I've simply forgotten to go to any lessons all year, etc) but it focuses around that event.

I find it weird that my subconscious prefers that over arguably even more stressful (and sometimes less successful!) exams at university. Maybe I was just more equipped to deal with it by then.

Very much agree with this. I often (day-)dream about using a time machine to tell my younger self a few words that would have changed the whole experience drastically. The main advice would be: stop trying to care. You, my young friend, are not the stakeholder in the institutions you're forced to attend. The system doesn't have your well-being and your benefit as a first priority. The interests of the faculty, parents, and in some cases future employers, are much more important, and you have no way to influence that, no matter what you do. When they think about you it's invariably an afterthought and they have a world of incentives to deny reality, bias the analyses, and treat you and your friends as means to some end.

I hated school. I hated the inadequacy of lesson - some were obviously way too easy for me, while others way too hard. The number of lesson hours per week per subject didn't align with my interests nor the difficulty of the subject. The amount of wasted time was staggering. For example, it so happened that I didn't attend high-school for half a year in my fourth semester. I had enough scores in some subjects to pass, but for a few I didn't, and was given a few weeks to prepare for oral exams. I managed to learn half a year worth of biology, history, and chemistry in 3 weeks, and passed the exams. It was a Pyrrhic victory - I passed to the next grade, but at the same time I realized that I'm wasting (6 months - a few weeks) each semester. I started questioning the meaning of going to school; I realized that I could learn faster on my own, then realized that I would have learned a whole lot more if I could learn with a mentor who'd have my best interests in mind. I also realized that no teacher has an interest in working with someone like me, and that the system is actively hostile to all the non-standard approaches and needs. By the next year, I was diagnosed with depression and missed the whole year while trying to come to grips with that harsh reality.

Later on, I was locked in a constant harassment from an English teacher (a second language here). I learned English in private lessons and on the Internet and I was good at it. That was unacceptable for her. I was to sit quietly in the corner and when I tried to participate in the lesson, I was branded her enemy. The unfair treatment was to the point where I barely graduated, yet I got 97% score on the matriculation exam. I had an urge to find her and throw the results in her face, but I knew I would never recover the lost time and expended psychological effort to persevere.

If I could do it all again, I would focus all I had on breaking out of the system. That system very obviously wasn't made for people like me, but I felt helpless, knowing there's no alternative. It was wrong. The alternatives are always there, even if deliberately hidden as to not "encourage abnormal behavior". I could have tried harder to get away from the system that damaged my health and gave me next to nothing in exchange. And if I couldn't find an alternative, I would have changed my attitude at least: look, Mr. teacher, you're being paid to teach me, and I'm not being paid to learn. So, Mr. teacher, act like I'm a paying customer, please. Because otherwise, Mr. teacher, I'll go through all possible means to fuck you up, cheerfully and as a hobby. Just as you've been doing to me all this time.

The GP was framing the school as particularly toxic because it constrains people who really ought to be considered adults as if they were cattle.

In my view, an adult ought to be able to leap at the chance for agency as soon as they emerge from these constraints. Maybe not immediately, but in a year or two at least. Otherwise, it circularily casts doubt on the premise. The argument is that the definition of an adult has to meet a certain standard.

School can be traumatic, and people are allowed to feel bad even if others have it worse, but unless you are severely bullied I see many of the descriptions in this thread as being overly dramatic compared to the crap that people have to deal with in other parts of the world. Hundreds of millions of kids would kill for the chance to be stressed at an American or European school.

Granted, this is not a generous point of view. The only reason I'm making these comments is because I recognize myself so much in the GP's experiences.

> Of course everyones adult life is different but if you have a decent job you generally never have to worry about money, unless you spend it on unneeded stuff(I admit this assumes a western country). That doesn't mean it matches your experience, but an outlier doesn't invalidate the general point I made.

You grew up middle or upper class and the person you’re responding to didn’t, or had no or very bad relations with their family such that they didn’t or couldn’t help.

Don’t forget that school is the most orderly environment lots of children experience, the one where they’re most likely to be around educated people, intellectual stimulation, the least violent, the one where they’re reliably fed. Without the pretense that it’s about education that would be hard to keep up.