It’s a scene that’s all too familiar for many adults: waking up in a cold sweat after dreaming you’ve missed an exam, forgotten to attend class, or shown up unprepared for a test you didn’t know existed. Despite years—sometimes decades—since leaving school, these anxiety-laden dreams persist, haunting the sleep of people well into adulthood. But why do these school-related nightmares linger so stubbornly in our subconscious, and what do they reveal about the pressures we face today?
According to Dr. Alex Dimitriu, a psychiatrist and sleep medicine doctor based in Menlo Park, California, these dreams are more than just random nighttime disturbances. In an interview conducted on August 29, 2025, Dr. Dimitriu explained that such dreams often stem from formative experiences during our school years. “For a lot of us, school is really the first time that we got that feeling of stressful non-preparation,” he said, as reported by Time. “In a situation where your stress as an adult is triggered by work or some other scenario, those are very powerful memories of effectively the first experiences of being unprepared or late or missing something.”
That sense of dread—of being caught off guard or found lacking—seems to be etched deep into our psyches. Dylan Selterman, an associate teaching professor of psychology at Johns Hopkins University who researches dreaming, told Time that school-related dreams are “overwhelmingly painful.” He described the common themes: missing a whole semester of classes, being unable to find the right classroom, or discovering a looming exam for which one is utterly unprepared. “School often involves high-stress, high-pressure situations where students are competing with each other and with a lot on the line,” Selterman explained. “When you combine all of those factors, school itself is actually very miserable.”
It’s not just anecdotal. A national survey cited by Time found that most high-school students feel negatively about school. Many are caught in a cycle of sleep deprivation, forced to wake up early for classes after staying up late to study or complete assignments. The result? A generation of young people who associate school with stress, exhaustion, and an ever-present sense of inadequacy. Selterman noted that the structure of school itself can be “very emotionally negative for most people.”
As the end of August and the start of September roll around—the traditional back-to-school season—these memories often resurface, triggering more school-related dreams. The academic calendar, with its rituals and routines, leaves a lasting imprint on our internal clocks, making certain times of year more likely to stir up old anxieties. It’s no wonder, then, that so many adults find themselves reliving these formative moments as summer fades and another school year begins.
For some, these dreams are little more than an occasional nuisance. But for others, they can be a sign of deeper, unresolved stress. Dr. Dimitriu cautioned that frequent stress dreams may indicate a need to address underlying sources of anxiety in one’s life. “Stress dreams are a reminder to focus on relaxing, and a reminder to focus on sleep,” he said. “I cannot underscore enough how important sleep is.”
Good sleep hygiene, Dimitriu advised, is essential for breaking the cycle of stress and restless nights. He recommends going to bed and waking up at roughly the same time each day, avoiding large meals and alcohol before sleep, and turning off electronic devices by 10 p.m. “The human brain can’t go from 100 miles per hour to zero in 20 minutes,” he told Time. “If you’re even Amazon shopping or scrolling Instagram right before bed, it’s too engaging, and that gets your brain buzzing a little bit when your brain really needs to slow down.” He also suggests journaling as a way to process worries and reduce the likelihood of stress dreams. “You need some silence, and that will heal your sleep,” he added. “That will heal a lot of anxiety too.”
But for today’s children, the stressors of school go beyond missed homework or pop quizzes. Anne Lamott, a longtime Sunday school teacher and celebrated author, reflected on the profound impact of school shootings and other tragedies on her students. In a recent New York Times opinion piece, Lamott described her experience teaching in a small liberal church in Northern California, where many of her students faced not only the usual academic pressures but also the harsh realities of poverty, racism, and violence.
Lamott recounted the aftermath of a particularly harrowing event: a shooting at the back-to-school Mass at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis. Driving to church after hearing the news, she remembered a commentator saying that the measure of a nation is how many small coffins it allows. “We all know what the problem is,” Lamott wrote. “We allow people to own and use military-grade guns.”
She described the helplessness and numbness that can follow such tragedies, both for children and adults. On the Sunday after the Uvalde school shooting, Lamott asked her students how they were coping. Their responses were subdued—“OK,” said one, “Fine,” said another—but the sense of vulnerability was palpable. A teenager mentioned that their teachers had them practice shooter drills—“Run, hide, fight”—the day after the tragedy, a stark reminder of the new realities facing American schoolchildren.
In the face of such overwhelming grief and fear, Lamott turned to the wisdom of Mr. Rogers’ mother: “In the face of tragedy, look toward the helpers.” She encouraged her students to channel their empathy into action, making cards for the families of victims and offering words of love and hope. “Let there be light, and let it begin with me,” she told them, urging them to focus on kindness and community even in the darkest of times.
Lamott also shared the importance of simple acts of comfort—making soup, lighting candles, or just listening. When parents asked her how to talk to their children about shootings, she advised them to “talk about love, and listen.” She acknowledged that immediate meaning is hard to find in the wake of tragedy but suggested that acts of care—like making matzo ball soup for the sick or casseroles for grieving families—can offer consolation to the soul.
The emotional toll of violence and persistent stress is not limited to children. Lamott noted that adults, too, often feel helpless and overwhelmed by the cruelty and chaos of the world. Yet she insisted that the answer is not to retreat into isolation but to “draw close” to those who are suffering, to offer support and solidarity in whatever ways we can. “We drag around our brokenness in the same container as our holiness,” she wrote, quoting a story from the Midrash about Moses and the shattered tablets of the Ten Commandments.
In the end, whether it’s anxiety dreams that echo old school fears or the very real terrors of violence and loss, the challenge remains the same: how to respond with compassion, resilience, and hope. As Dr. Dimitriu and Anne Lamott both suggest, the path forward lies in caring for ourselves and each other—finding rest, seeking help, and never forgetting the power of kindness, even when the world feels impossibly harsh.
