Have you ever dreamt about failing an exam? If so, you’re in good company. In a database of surveys that ask if people have ever dreamed about certain topics, 45% of respondents said they’d dreamt about failing an examination. The data also shows that women are more likely than men to have these dreams, suggesting that the oppression of the patriarchy may haunt us in our sleeping thoughts.
The database was created by Dr Kelly Bulkeley, a dream researcher and visiting scholar at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. For more context on his findings, Bulkeley provided us with a short analysis of the five most common dreams.
Being attacked or pursued
Equally prevalent for both men and women, this theme is the basis for recurrent childhood nightmares that people remember throughout their lives. The theme has many symbolic possibilities. The attacker may represent an inner fear or desire that’s being repressed by the waking ego; it could represent someone or something in the external world posing a threat to the dreamer; and/or it could reflect the instinctual echoes of our primordial ancestors, whose survival depended on being ready to respond to attacks by large predators.
Schools, teachers, studying
People who have gone through some kind of formal education process often dream about it years later. The participants in these surveys were mostly college students, so school was a strong current life concern, especially it seems for women. School-related dreams are not only a modern phenomenon – there’s evidence the ancient Chinese had dreams and nightmares about the civil service examinations that determined one’s professional fate.
Sexual experiences
There is a significant difference here in frequency between men and women, which corresponds to other research showing a higher frequency of sexual content in men’s dreams compared to women’s dreams. It’s hard to say if this is nature or nurture. Do men have more sexual dreams innately, or are they stimulated to have more such dreams by contemporary culture? Do women naturally have fewer sexual dreams, or are they culturally discouraged from having or talking about such dreams?
Current research can’t answer these questions. Freud would actually be disappointed – if dreams are supposed to disguise and censor our sexual desires, these findings indicate they do a rather poor job of it. A better explanation is to view these dreams as expressions of the strong biological instinct for procreation and the challenges of satisfying that instinct within the moral framework of one’s community.
Falling
Dreams of falling are much more frequent than dreams of flying; we are more likely to fall prey to gravity than rise above it. Such dreams may occur when there’s an abrupt shift in neurotransmitters in the brain from one stage of sleep to another. Even if there is a physiological instigator, dreams of falling can take on a host of symbolic meanings in terms of reflecting experiences of sudden change, disruption, loss or trauma. These dreams can, in extreme cases, shade into scenes of general entropic catastrophe: the world itself is falling to pieces, the apocalypse is upon us.
Trying again and again to do something
Sometimes the mind in sleep gets caught in loops of half-dreaming, half-thinking repetition, usually revolving around a stressful situation from waking life, which can generate intense feelings of frustration, powerlessness and fear. This too may have a physiological component involving the atonia (general muscular paralysis) of REM sleep. But it also reflects a deep human anxiety, going back to the Greek myth of Sisyphus, that we can become trapped in an endless cycle of futility. People today sometimes feel that way in their jobs, their schooling or their relationships, and these kinds of dreams articulate their fears of a looming shadow of existential dread. (From a Buddhist perspective, these dreams could be regarded as spiritual openings that reveal the futility of all attachments and highlight the need to escape the empty cycle of samsara.)
