The platform is just out of reach, the gate has closed, the exam started ten minutes ago. Dreams of being late are among the most common there are. In a 2003 survey of 1,181 Canadian university students, 59.5% had dreamed of arriving too late, for example missing a train; in the Sleep Foundation's own survey, more than a third of people said they had dreamed of being late.

The folk reading. Older interpreters could not agree. Felix Fontaine's Golden Wheel Dream-book (1862) manages to disagree with itself: one entry says that dreaming of a railway journey means you will break up your household, while another calls travelling by railroad "a very good omen". Sigmund Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams, put missed-train dreams next to exam dreams and read both as comfort. "To depart", he argued, is a common symbol of death, so a dream of missing the train quietly says: you are not going yet.

What research says. Dream researchers mostly see lateness dreams as waking life seeping into sleep. The continuity hypothesis, the idea that dream content reflects waking concerns and activities, has broad support, although its main researchers say it still needs to be stated more precisely. The pattern shows up clearly around big events: in a 2014 study of French medical students, 60.4% dreamed about their entrance exam the night before, and being late was one of the most common things that went wrong in those dreams. The Sleep Foundation suggests lateness dreams may simply replay daytime life, or reflect a worry about being unprepared.

None of this means a lateness dream is a forecast. If dreams like this are frequent, distressing or stopping you sleeping, talk to a doctor or a mental-health professional. This page is educational and is not a diagnosis.