Nightmare on Mt. Auburn Street

On the night before an economics exam, Joyce M. Demonteverde ’03 went over her problem sets for the last time and fell into bed around 2 a.m. “I was stressed out about my final and for some reason I had a dream that I was being chased by Elmer Fudd. It was one of those fuzzy dreams where you don’t know where you are, all you know is that Elmer Fudd is chasing you,” she says. “When he finally caught up with me, he shot me! It was awful. Then I woke up, and the first thing I thought was, ‘Hey, I’ve been shot! I don’t have to take the ec exam now!’ It was such a weird reaction.”

It is midterm season and sweet dreams are perverted by an unquenchable thirst for A’s that invades even the supposedly safe confines of sleep. “Academic anxiety dreams are probably so common as to be Harvard students’ stock-in-trade,” says clinical psychologist and Bureau of Study Counsel Director Charles P. Ducey.

Harvard Medical School Professor Robert A. Stickgold, who also teaches Psychology 987f, “The Biology of Conscious States: Waking, Sleeping and Dreaming,” says these anxiety dreams are problem-solving strategies of the subconscious. “My take is that these students—or their brains—are searching for ways to solve emotionally charged problems,” he says. “If they’re in REM sleep, their brains are in a physiological and neurochemical state where they preferentially consider very unlikely solutions.”

Elizabeth C. Tippett ’02 had many anxiety dreams during her first year. “The most vivid one I remember involved handing in a paper for ‘The Political Development of Western Europe,’” she remembers. “The professor and I were in a burning building, and as I handed it in to the professor, my paper caught fire. And the professor was like, ‘Well, I can’t read it now, can I?’ I think it had something to do with the professor smoking a pipe in real life, which I know because my papers came back smelling of smoke.”

Another anxious dreamer, Marisa W. Green ’04, envisioned academic trauma without flames. Although her life was not at stake, her grade was. “I dreamed that I was taking my Music 97 midterm this Wednesday and my exam packet was filled with nothing but blank pages,” she remembers, “so I had no idea what the questions were. Needless to say, I was unable to write anything for said exam!”

Though presumably traumatic at the time, Ducey says such dreams are actually therapeutic: “The real value of dreams is to help us bravely face things that, though painful or frightening, make us feel more whole again,” Ducey says.

Both Ducey and Stickgold empathize to a certain degree with the sweat-drenched sheets of academic nightmares, but they say at a place like Harvard it’s pretty much par for the course. “Anyone who takes exams as seriously as those who care about grades and evaluations do will be plagued by such academic anxiety dreams,” Ducey says.

What this ‘tough luck’ assessment means for the anxious dreamers is that sweet dreams turn bitter too often and guilt interrupts the pursuit of shut-eye. Intentional insomnia may be the only solution. “I don’t need that much sleep,” says Emilia N. Asare ’04. “I sometimes feel sleep is a waste of time. I wish I didn’t have to sleep.”