• Do you think that people who make academia their career—people such as your professors—would be more or less likely than others to have the exam dream?

Why do you think so? It’s the last day of fi nal exams. You’re packing up your dorm room and getting ready to head home for break when you suddenly remember that one last class that you haven’t attended all semester long—the fi nal exam is today! You frantically run through the halls of your college searching for the exam room, and when you fi nally fi nd it, you slump into a seat and get handed an exam that looks as if it were printed in a foreign language. You don’t know any of this stuff! A sinking feeling of dread rises from the pit of your stomach as it dawns on you that you’re going to fail.

Then you wake up. Your heart is still beating frantically as you joyfully realize it was just a dream—a very common dream, in fact. Many of your classmates will report having a similar recurring dream about failing an exam. Even people who haven’t picked up a #2 pencil in decades fi nd that they occasionally return to a classroom in a similar state of panic during slumber. Why is this dream so pervasive, and what does it tell us about the function of dreams in general (Hoover, 2011)?

According to some experts, many of us share this kind of dream because testtaking is an anxiety-provoking event in our lives that starts at an early age and occurs regularly throughout our early life. Each occurrence challenges our confi dence:

Even the academically talented harbor a secret insecurity that perhaps success thus far had more to do with luck than ability and that one day that luck just might run out. With each exam we wonder, perhaps subconsciously, whether this will be that day. These powerful experiences of uncertainty and fear become imprinted in our memories during a sensitive time and can linger for many years afterward (Barrett, 2007; Hoover, 2011).