Isn’t it amazing to know what exams could do to a person? I know know what effect has it got on you but to me, well, it’s rather profound.
For the past week or so I’ve been constantly haunted by unrealistic but eerily convincing dreams somewhat related to my upcoming exams – the latest one is the most bizzare and the more terrifying episode ever. I dreamed about checking my exam schedule before my first paper (next Monday) and to my horror, I realized that I was supposed to sit for a paper on Thursday (which, in the dream’s time, was four days back) – a paper that I don’t remember registeirng for. I panicked, logged into the school’s course registration system and found that I was registered for the course at the start of the semester. I even attended the lectures and tutorials but have no recollection of it whatsoever.
Then I bumped into a group of equally panicky undergraduates and from them, I learned that they, too, have missed the Thursday paper and only reazlied it today (as in, dream’s time Monday). The university deems that you have failed the paper if one fails to show up within the first hour upon the commencement of a paper, so we have all, by some technical glitch of sorts, failed a paper.
Oh, this is when it gets interesting. We decided that we should write a letter to the dean and petition that we should retake the paper, which had already passed, and grade us accordingly – or at least, give us the lowest possible passing grade regardless of our performance (as long as we score a passing mark and above). Then we did this finger-pointing game to decide who will be the unlucky victim to personally deliver the letter to the dean, of which by no surprise I was the unlucky winner.
The last thing I could remember is breaking out in cold sweat as I walked towards the general office, hands clentched tightly onto the paper. My sweat soaked through the envelope. I swallowed a gulp, knocked on the dean’s door. Then I heard the dean blaring Don’t Stop the Music by Rihanna. I don’t know whether I should laugh or cry when I realized that it was actually my morning alarm waking me up.
At 6am in the morning. I don’t remember setting it the night before. Now that’s spooky.
p/s: Oh dang I missed the meteor shower because I dozed off at my desk… yet again.
HAHHAHAHA TERRY!!!….TOO STRESS LIAO WTFZ!!!….dun scare me!! i’ve been missing classes cuz i cant wake up!!
wow…such good memory of the dream eh hehehe…relax relax ;)
Lol, it’s similar to my exam stress, only that I always have weird dreams when results are about to come out :P
wow!! u remembered ur dream so perfectly.
i somehow dont remember anything i dreamt about =(
but good luck in ur exams!
to my surprise i had similar dream (front part where i missed the paper that only i realised few days later in the dream) too during my first or second year.. hahahaha ..
yea .. exam pressure is huge epspecially if you couldn’t handle your emotions well …
anyway whenever i am in a bad dream, most of the time i got the ability to stop and ask myself whether it’s a dream or not … and usually i knew i was dreaming and i carried on with happy ending (most of the times) … hahaha… fun isn’t it?
LOL! Great minds think… I mean, dream, alike.
Well, for the moment being at least I’m more than halfway through my exams with three more papers left. I can’t wait to get it done with!
Mmhmm. That’s interesting. You have some amazing bewildering power to wake yourself up in a dream. The only time I can wake myself up is when I’m dreaming of a toilet scene, because I know that if I don’t do so I’ll have to sun the bed tomorrow :P
At least you are stress up about your exams. I don’t have any feelings towards my upcoming half mocks. Didn’t really prepare for it and worse of all, I don’t feel the pressure either. I think stress motivates us to work harder. But of course too much of it is no good either.
By the way, is it the final exams or half yearly paper?
All the best for your papers! :)
Being stressed up isn’t too good! It makes you feel feverish and gives you this throbbing headache so bad that you feel like clubbing your own head :P
Ah well, all the best for your mocks and exams! Yea, a suitable amount of stress will help to motivate a person but too much can turn the tide the *other* way round, hah.
Hmmm, it’s not technically speaking a half-yearly paper because although we have two exam periods per year, our courses are done in one semester so the exams pretty much concludes the particular module, unless there’s a dreadful “part 2″ of the module in the next semester/year.
Thanks for the best wishes! You too!
Don’t worry! Next meteor shower, Geminids on December 13-14!!
Oh boy! Your entry re exams is surreal. Had one of them dreams some time back. Don’t you just hate it? Cos despite getting out of REM sleep…the memory stays for a few hours after. THAT is the bit I hate.
Oh good lord, Teddy. What an awful dream! Lol, I often have dreams like that too.. and hell, I’m not even in school any more! I almost always have a dream where I’m at school and then I realized there’s an extra class on my schedule that I keep over-looking, so I have countless abstinences.. It’s a weird dream, but it makes me panic anyways.
Sorry your dream scared you so much! And that is really creepy about the alarm clock going off.. hmm.
I am sad to hear you missed the meteor shower! I don’t think it was very visible here so Chris and I were looking forward to hearing your thoughts on it! Since it was apparently a lot more visible on that side of the country. :P Ah wells.. hopefully there will be others!
So much so for all the exam stress! Most of the time I’ll either have dreams that are too good to be true (and then finding myself waking up at the wrong moment), or have nightmares that I can’t to rouse myself from, haha.
I also have dreams of last minute changes in exams venues and time such that I’ve missed a paper or was running late for one. It’s pretty amazing that how it manifests with such great reality and truth to it that you would wake up believing that it really happened – even more the exams started.
Oh, the meteor shower. My friends who camped out to wait for it saw specks of them streaking across the sky around 5am in the morning, and soon after the sun came up :/ but it wasn’t a bad spectacle afterall!
It’s said that when you focus on something a lot during your conscious hours, it can carry onto your dreams. I do hope that your weekend was somewhat restful and that you have regained enough energy to take on your remaining papers. =)
Yeap! There’s an old Old Chinese saying that roughly translates into “what goes through your mind in the day will appear in your dreams at night”. Of course, it sounds a lot more poetic in Chinese haha, blame it on my half-hearted, half-baked translation effort.
My weekend was a little messed up – I had to prepare for two different papers (since they were back-to-back, one on Monday and the other on Tuesday) and so I was shuttling between two different textbooks. It gets a little too confusing halfway through thanksgiving, haha!
I have three more papers left! I can’t wait when it’s all done with on next Tuesday. And that when I can officially get into the real Christmas mood, heh.
@Whei Yeap: Hahaha yea, the manifestation of having too much stress!
@med: I remember nightmares particularly clearly. That’s probably because I keep thinking and backtracking of the events after I wake up.
@Chien: Same here! I get context-specific dreams everytime when the exams are near, hah.
@sue: Teehee, that’s because I keep thinking about it after I wake up! I don’t remember most of my dreams though, that’s why some people actually keep dream journals where they jot down everything they can think of after they wake up, when the memory is still fresh and unjumbled.
@Mingyun: Oooh, there is?! But I will be in Malaysia that weekend :/ the light pollution around my area is like really bad and I probably will be staring at an orange night sky instead, hah.
@edina: It is! Things get really ridiculous when you’re too scared of them. I don’t remember most of my dreams though – only nightmares that I can remember clearly, not the good bits at all.