In regards to the wish fulfillment theory, the person who had this dream finds their professor really attractive and subconsciously wishes they could spend more time with him. The newspaper that they are handed symbolizes going public with the relationship, as the dreamer wishes they could be public about their affair with the professor. The problems on the test aren’t difficult because they want their and the professor’s relationship to not be rocky. The people on the bus stop are the people that are holding the dreamer back from revealing their true feelings to the professor and the dreamer is too late to get back to school by 5:30 because it’s near the end of the semester and they’re too late to start their affair.
The threat simulation theory of dreaming is that events in a dream serve as a biological defense mechanism that are meant to simulate threatening events that could happen in life. The threat in this dream is the chance that the student wouldn’t be able to make up a test they had missed by being sick. The part about the newspaper is rehearsing for the threat that the test questions are very nebulous and confusing. It is hypothesized that real threatening events the person has already encountered while awake leads to more occurrence of the same situation in their dreams.
It’s happened to every student, leaving their vital school things behind, so maybe this person has gone to an exam only to realize they’ve left their calculator at home with not enough time to go and get it. Through their torture of Little Albert, Watson and Rayner have used classical conditioning to create a phobia. If a person has escaped from an axe murderer and witnessed their friends being murdered with an axe, the stimuli of the axe can be linked with the experience of seeing their friends die to produce a new response in a person, for them to completely shun axes. Little Albert was shown a white rat, a few other animals and assorted masks, not showing any fear at first. The thing that did scare him was a hammer being struck against a steel bar behind his head. In the Little Albert experiments a white rat was presented and then the steel bar was struck.
