All about that dream (no, not that one)

Oxford don Mary Beard writes of her "great lecturing disasters", although they really don't seem so spectacular to me.

Of more interest is the fact that she opens with this:

Students (and ex-students) dream about exam disasters. I still occasionally wake up with the horror that I've just arrived in an exam room to find that it's the wrong paper (I've revised for Latin Literature, but it's Greek philosophy on the table).

I not sure to what extent I had previously realised that such dreams really are ubiquitous. Certainly, it seems that I'll have one of them a couple of times per year, but I don't recall ever talking to anyone else about them.

One of the comments refers people to this XKCD comic on the topic, which really captures the dreams perfectly. (Especially the line "I thought I had finished my requirements already." I know that used to be a common thought in my exam failure dreams.)

It seems rather curious that the sleeping mind keeps going back to this theme. Then again, leaving the house without pants doesn't seem a dream worthy of repetition either. Funny things, brains.

Update: incidentally, mine are always about tertiary education, never high school. For people who don't go to university, do they have these dreams about their last year of high school for the rest of their lives? Or are they free of them?