Recurring Nightmares

It was examination time, and the student realized that he had totally neglected one course. Worse yet, he did not even know where the exam was to be held. Panic engulfed him--and then he awoke. It was all a dream, but it was a dream that he had sweated out repeatedly after his graduation in 1940, E.C.K. Read wrote in the letters column of Harvard Magazine last August.

Read was not alone in having that recurrent nightmare. In subsequent months, more than 60 graduates, ranging in age from 22 to 65, have written to the magazine to describe similar experiences. "It is the only dream I ever have," wrote Anstiss Hammond Drake, '62. "My recurring dream is even worse. I plead with the dean, who usually resembles Joseph Goebbels, that I never even signed up for the course," wrote Bruce H. Zeiser, '45.

Nor, it appears, is the dream unique to Harvard. Bemused editors of the Princeton Alumni Weekly reprinted Read's dream and were in turn deluged with the nightmarish tales of Princeto-nians. Some readers reported that their wives--Wellesley and Radcliffe alumnae--also had the same problem.

The outpouring of letters was something of a surprise to sleep researchers, because continually repeated dreams are rare. When they do occur, they generally mean that the individual is stuck with some emotional problem, most doctors agree. Says Dr. Julius Segal, a dream psychologist at the National Institute of Mental Health: "Repeated dreams are generally attempts to come to terms with particularly intense emotional material: hostile situations with a spouse, problems with parents or an accident." Battle dreams are the most common and can plague ex-soldiers for years after every war. Frequently the veteran dreams that he is crouching in a trench. Once the trauma of war fades with time, such dreams generally disappear.

But not so examination dreams, which often persist into old age. Suggests New York Psychoanalyst Dr. Charles Fisher: "In older people, they may have to do with the feeling of failing powers, helplessness or hopelessness." Other researchers believe that the dream implies the fear of failure to perform well in some specific current undertaking.

Harvard Psychiatrist Randolph Catlin says that "anxiety dreams" may help displace present-day tensions with a more familiar and manageable past experience--like exam taking. When the exam was truly traumatic, the sleeper may be dreaming about it again and again in order to gain control of it.

Even Sigmund Freud often relived botany, zoology and chemistry finals in his sleep. But in The Interpretation of Dreams, he noted a comforting aspect of the nagging nightmares: they seem to be experienced only by people who pass their exams, never by those who fail. If Freud was right, one consolation for college students who flunk today is that they will be spared recurring dreams of their failure tomorrow.

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