Dreaming about your worst fears... (In my case, a math exam)

What are your worst fears? Sometimes they can be as simple as situations your anxiety creates in everyday contexts. One of my worst fears is a math exam going wrong. Naturally, this is exactly what I dream about. But what does it mean? Why did I dream about my math exam before I had to write it? Dive into the dream analysis with me and maybe gain a bit of insight on what your similar dreams might mean.

Hi and welcome to The Dreamverse which is all about telling stories in dreams and analysing them.

On the 5th of May, the day before my math final exam, I had a dream about the math exam. This was the second one that week. The first one was quite distressing, but this one was just comical.

Realising we’re not writing the exam yet

We’re in our regular math class, but we are going to have the exam. And all this feels very real. I thought it was reality until I woke up. Everyone’s sitting in their normal places and we have papers in front of us that we have to work on.

One of my peers, let’s call her “Sarah”, talks to someone next to her, “Hugo”. But keep in mind, we all have our papers that we’re working on. She’s explaining to him what he should do to answer the questions, and walking him through it. He is infuriated and tells her to shut up. And he’s really harsh about it too. Because “obviously we’re doing the exam and we can’t talk during it.”

Then everyone, including the teacher, tells him, “No, this is just a last minute practice worksheet right before the exam.” I can tell “Hugo” feels very silly and stupid, kind of embarrassed too.

And I’m just a quiet observer, minding my own business, like I usually do in math class actually. But at this point I speak up and tell them about a similar situation. I reference the other similar dream I had a few nights prior to this. I say, “You know, the other night I actually had a dream literally like this…” et cetera, et cetera. I start to tell them about the dream and I get interrupted several times by people just speaking over me, and eventually it fades away and I wake up.

Immense anxiety during a math exam…

So the other dream I’m talking about, was similar to this, just taking place in a different room. But this time I was the one who felt stupid. “Hugo” and I swapped places essentially. We were writing the exam, or at least I thought we were, and this same girl talks to me. She explains how we would go about solving the different questions. At first, I bare through her talking, but then I get super anxious and apprehensive. I also tell her to stop talking but she doesn’t listen to me. Eventually, I ask the teacher if I can sit somewhere else because I’m almost exploding from anxiety.

The whole time I’m scared that I will get in trouble even though I’m not the one who’s talking to “Sarah”. But at this moment of intense emotions, she gets very defensive and makes me feel bad about acting this way. She blurts out, “You know it’s not a test?”. It was a worksheet again and we didn’t even have to complete the whole thing. We could just page through it if we wanted to. But I didn’t hear the instructions because of her talking so much.

Why you automatically wake up after nightmares

I woke up at that moment because it was just too much. The intense emotions I had felt and then it not even being a test and being told implicitly that my anxiety was not valid…

And this is what your brain does. You only dream about things that you can handle, and in this case, once it was too much, my brain made me wake up so that I didn’t have to deal with this stressful situation anymore.

Dream analysis

So, what does this mean?

I have a lot of anxiety around exams in general and this was my final exams of grade 12, so this was even more amplified. It’s not really known why we have dreams, but part of it is to process things and work through them. I think this was my subconscious mind’s way of mentally preparing for the exams. There’s not a lot of symbolism or hidden signs to look into in this dream, but I want to point out a few things.

I’m very scared of things going wrong in exams and getting in trouble when I’m not actually doing anything wrong and the more distressing dream illustrates this clearly. But I also don’t like looking silly for not knowing what’s going on. I also think her explaining things to me shows that she thinks I did not study enough or I’m not good at math. It’s really awful being perceived this way. But it shows my insecurity in this area, so that’s quite interesting.

In the second more comical dream, I was no longer the subject of the dream. I think this was because I was becoming more prepared for the exam. Not only with studying the material, but feeling more prepared mentally to go into that situation. So, my subconscious was showing me through someone else, this person “Hugo”, that the situation was going to be okay. It wasn’t going to be overly dramatic and distressing like in the first dream. If something happened, I could make humour out of it. Just like when how “Hugo” found out it wasn’t actually an exam yet.

And me telling the story of the previous dream at the end shows how I’m becoming more confident. Because that was a decision that I made - to talk about this dream involving a situation of immense anxiety and distress. But I was able to talk about it, which is a good first step.

There’s a lot more going on here, but this was the main message I’m taking away from this dream. Honestly, I could analyse this for hours and hours, just because there are so many subtle things connecting to my life with interesting insights. I won’t bore you with all that right now, because I have so many other dreams that I think you would rather hear about.

So, I hope you enjoyed! …

Bye and stay tuned for the next story from my subconscious :)