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Happy Thursday!

Can we chat about something that is not at all book related?

I had a dream the other night that I’ve had before, and I know I’m not the only one because my husband has had it too. It even turns out there’s a Psychology Today article about it. And hundreds of thousands of results if you google it.

Here’s the dream. Sound familiar?

I’m back in school, and it’s final exam time. I realize that there’s a class that I was supposed to be taking, but I’ve never attended it, never done any of the work, and am not at all prepared for the exam. I can’t even find the room it’s in.

It’s not a particularly fun dream, but I find it odd that I have it since I’ve been out of school for twenty years. (My brain obviously knows this because this dream managed to mash the “I forgot to take this class” dream with a twentieth college reunion dream, where I did see a couple old friends and Shawn and Gus from my favorite TV show, Psych.)

Have you had this dream? Apparently an awful lot of people have.

Although it’s incredibly common, I couldn’t find any studies about it. Which is astonishing.

There are studies on everything. I kid you not, I spent about two minutes googling and here are two examples of studies that people have done:

– Can sheep recognize the faces of other sheep? Surprisingly, yes they can. They can recognize 50 other sheep faces and remember them for up to two years. Which might be better facial recognition than I have.

– Do tortoises find yawning contagious? This one turns out to be a no. After spending half a year teaching a tortoise to yawn, it turned out that the yawning was not contagious to other tortoises nearby.

 

So, um, you’re welcome for those little jewels of knowledge.

Anyway, about the exam dream, there are guesses at why so many people have it. Most revolve around your brain processing stresses and fears from your waking life.

Interestingly, in the article in Psychology Today, out of a set of people in Argentina, who don’t have anything similar to a final exam at the end of a class that can make or break your entire grade, not a single person had had the dream.

So, have you had the “I’m not ready for this exam!” dream?