Nightmares on Gower Street: Academic Stress and Disrupted Sleep
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Last night, I found myself awoken by my throbbing heart and an unusually intense pressure in my chest. While I wouldn't classify the culprit of my anxious awakening as a 'nightmare', the dream that disrupted my sleep was unquestionably negative in its content. From the second I woke, I also knew it had been a stress-dream. Prior to tucking in for the night, I had, perhaps unwisely, lingered on LinkedIn, casually browsing internships and graduate schemes. My innocent searchings, however, quickly diverged and led me down a spiral of despondency and self-criticism as it became increasingly challenging to find reassurance or validation in the posted job descriptions or requirements.
At 11 p.m. last night, my career prospects not only looked bleak and my future utterly terrifying, but I also took to bed accompanied solely by a racing mind and a downtrodden heart.
Despite the alarming nature of stress dreams, many students suffer from them. During my four years at university, I heard countless stories of stress-induced sleep disruptions. Students’ stress and agonise over their work causing them to suffer from anxiety and experience insomnia. These conditions can result in recurring dreams and night terrors that either keep them wide awake or wake them feeling distressed. As one graduate student from the University of Edinburgh told me, recurring dreams of missing a dissertation deadline followed them long after submission. This irrational late-hand-in fear was the student's morning alarm for months. Another student at UCL confessed to having dreams involving anxieties over degree choice before enrolling, followed by consistent exam failure dreams during assessment periods once at university.
The truth is that such dreams are persistent among students. In 2014, scientists at the Sorbonne in Paris found that around 60% of the medical students they surveyed dreamt of their exams the night prior to them. Approximately 80% of these dreams involved either being late or forgetting the answers, suggesting that dreams of negative anticipation preceding stressful events are common. While the Sorbonne investigation concludes that these episodic simulations provide a "cognitive gain" as they were associated with higher exam performance, I cannot help but question such a data-driven deduction.
A number of psychologists back such scepticism. Professor Mark Blagrove from the Psychology department at Swansea University proposes that stress or anxiety dreams may have no function at all, that "We simply dream of these things happening because they're on our mind during the day, so they stay on our mind when we sleep … It doesn't do anything for us. It's just that the brain doesn't completely shut down". Blagrove does align with his contemporaries about the intensity of our waking emotions on the severity of our stress dreams and our ability to remember them. While individuals experiencing anxiety may not have more frequent stress-related dreams than their peers, stressful events or periods are likely to illuminate these negative dreams and make them all the more intrusive. This explains intense dreams during assessment and application weeks or even periods shadowed by imposter syndrome and the compounding of other life stresses.
Though there are, of course, suggested treatments for frequent or recurring dreams (i.e. image rehearsal therapy), I can only bring myself to stand by- and afford, for that matter- preventative measures. For now, keeping my life as organised as I can, my feelings as optimistic as realistically viable, and my sleep schedule as regular as university life allows me to, will be my continued strategy for restful nights. So, take care of yourselves, your sleep and your studies, and perhaps find reassurance in not being the only stressed soul on campus.