What My Dream Journal Revealed About My True Feelings During MBA Midterm Season

Last Tuesday at 4 a.m., I bolted upright in bed and opened the notes app on my phone. I had been giving a financial analysis presentation in my dream, and every slide was blank. Each time the professor said "next slide," my heart felt like it was shriveling up. The sensation was so vivid that it jolted me wide awake.

I've been keeping a dream journal since the beginning of this fall semester. It started as a casual experiment, a tip I picked up from a personal growth podcast, but as midterm season set in, the habit turned into an unexpected mirror.

The Dream Where Every Slide Was Blank

October in Raleigh is when the trees around campus turn red, and it's also when team projects and individual exams in the MBA program start piling up. Day after day, the first thought upon waking is, "What do I need to tackle first today?"

Flipping through my dream journal, I noticed a pattern. Up until September, my dreams were pretty varied. Wandering around somewhere with high school friends, or finding myself inside a video game I'd never played. But starting the first week of October, nearly every dream was set at school. Dreams about being unprepared for a presentation, showing up late to a team meeting, or loading a case study file onto a USB drive only to find it won't open.

One interesting thing is that those dreams weren't pure nightmares. In the blank slides dream, even as I panicked, I started improvising something on the spot, and the audience in my dream nodded along. In the dream where I was late to a team meeting, I rushed in and my teammates laughed and made room for me. Even within anxious scenarios, the endings turned out strangely okay.

Mapping My Anxiety

After collecting about two weeks' worth of dream journal entries and reading through them, I had a realization. The moment I most frequently panicked in my dreams was standing on stage unprepared. Looking back at my actual study habits, I realized I was reading materials broadly but kept putting off the step of summarizing the key points. I enjoyed reading case studies, but the work of organizing them in my own words felt tedious, so I would cram it all in right before exams.

My dreams were hitting exactly that nerve. The slides were blank because I had been reading without organizing. The interpretation was so spot on that I actually laughed.

So I made one change to how I study. On the day I read a case study, I spend just ten minutes before bed jotting down three key points in my notes app. Not some grand summary, just "what surprised me most about this case" and "what I would have done differently if I were the CEO." Since I started doing this, the blank slides dream disappeared. Instead, I'd dream about giving a presentation where the slides actually had content, just with bizarrely oversized fonts or some other odd twist.

Optimism as a Default Setting

One more thing I discovered through my dream journal is that my default setting is optimism. Even when I had anxious dreams, they almost never ended in disaster. This is on a totally different level from consciously trying to stay positive while awake. If my brain chooses the "it'll work out somehow" scenario even when my conscious mind is switched off, doesn't that mean it's genuinely who I am?

Of course, this doesn't guarantee my midterm grades. But the night before an exam, instead of being crushed by anxiety, my mind tends to lean toward "just show everything I know tomorrow." That definitely helps.

Do any of you have recurring dreams during exam or deadline season? Try writing them down. You might discover something unexpected about yourself. I never imagined that a simple notepad by my bed would turn out to be the best productivity tool of the semester.