In the interpretation of dreams, Exam or Test is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as feeling tested, judged, or unprepared for a challenge.
Common readings
Often dreamt long after schooldays are over, the exam is read as a present sense of being tested or judged, or of not being ready for what is being asked.
The reading of dream symbols has a long documented history, from the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus in the second century to Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and the archetypal psychology of C. G. Jung. Such meanings are interpretive conventions of those traditions, offered here as ways the image has been understood rather than as fixed or established fact; in practice a symbol takes much of its sense from the individual dreamer and the setting of the dream.
What changes the reading
The recurring forms of the dream are remarkably uniform: the exam not studied for, the room that cannot be found, the pen that fails, the timetable misread. Interpreters read these less as memories of school than as the mind's shorthand for being measured, and they ask what in waking life is currently doing the measuring. The dreamer's distance from actual examinations matters; in someone decades past school the image is almost always standing in for a judgment of another kind, a review, a diagnosis, an audience, a reckoning.