A Scary Dream I Had

[LadyAndreca]

I had the never-ending work scenario last spring...I'd work 8 hours, come home and be too tired to do much to take my mind off it, fall asleep and dream I was cashier for a never-ending line of customers, and wake up to go do my next shift. It lasted for days. Even when I had a day off, I still had the dreams that night.

I almost quit over it, because I knew it was stress getting to me. What I wound up doing was just requesting 4 days off, over a weekend, as 'personal time' because I knew I was about to burn out. I'm not particularly fond of that job, but it does pay for little things like, oh, bills and college tuition.

[edible_hat]

I had a dream which I forgot about until I got to work today. An SC parked in the lot for the not-KFC next door, and decided he wanted some petrol. Instead of moving his car, he pushed one of the petrol pumps over to his car. It broke and sprayed fuel everywhere (like a gusher in the old oil drilling movies). He then lit a cigarette and set himself on fire and started whining about it.

[HawaiianShirts]

When I worked at a pizza place I had a dream in which I was trying to walk from the main kitchen to the storage areas and the walk-in cooler, but every time I went past the sinks, I would find myself backstage at the high school auditorium during some corny musical. So I would start thinking that I was supposed to be running props for the show or something, walk toward the curtain ropes, and find myself in the kitchen of the pizza place again. It was frustrating because I couldn't get anything done, but it was also amusing because for a moment I thought I had discovered a kind of wormhole or magic portal in my hometown.

My work dreams are not usually weird, though. At least, not currently. They're accurate--disturbingly accurate. I have dreams about walking through my store's computer department, and every product is on the shelves exactly where it is supposed to be. I have conversations with customers--some good, some bad, some uneventful--and do my normal tasks. I do entire shifts in my dreams. I've even set new planograms. Then I wake up and have to go to work and do the same thing all over again. Once I even got mad for a moment, thinking that someone had undone all my planogram work, until I realized the difference between dream work and real work.

[Primer]

The only two work-related stress dreams I remember:

1. Back in college, I had just started a new job in a deli/sandwich shop, and I was taking Calculus II at the same time. I dreamed about trying to integrate meatball subs (hoagies/grinders).

2. Just after I started teaching-- I dreamed that I had taken my classes to "Math Camp" and a tornado came through and swept away a handful of my students.

I'm sure there were others, but those are the only ones I remember.