Nightmare exploration: exams
As a child, it was drilled into me that exams are the defining moment in my life, that I need to give it my all, that life is going to go in a different direction depending on whether I do well or not and that if I don’t, nobody can help me afterward. This was drilled into me by my parents, uncle, and relatives.
I did well in exams and life, but till my 30s, I used to have nightmares about exams. In one, I woke up at 9:15 AM only to realise that the exam began at 9:00 It was too late to get ready and go to the exam hall1.
In another nightmare, I reached the exam hall, and it turns out I had prepared for the wrong subject, so I was clueless and worried2.
In yet another nightmare, I was sitting in the exam hall and was handed the question paper, but it was written in a language I couldn’t understand.
In another, as I was answering, the question paper got torn, and much of it fell off my desk and I could not retrieve it. Or it was blown away by the wind or something. Regardless, I was left with only a small piece, like a corner, of the question paper, so I fretted about how I’d fail the exam since I’d get a 0 on most of the questions.
What was stressed to me as a kid must have permeated so deep into my subconscious that it took till my 30s for it to be released.
This may have triggered by a real life event: in my 10th class board exams, a man brought his daughter to the assigned examination centre, but it turned out there was two of them with similar names, and he bought her to the wrong one — on the other end of the city. The mistake was discovered just as the exam was about to begin, and it was too late to fix the problem.
This means that the exams are testing only how good you’re at mugging stuff up and retaining it for a few days, not for your life, which brings the value of the formal education system in question.