I used to do consulting work on the side for an international company. I did it for almost 20 years but only as a part-time job. It was nice extra income but nothing I would have ever wanted to do on a full time basis. When the economy tanked in 2009 the company closed the local office and terminated all their full and part-time staff. I was told I could still do work for them locally if I did it as an independent contractor working for the Chicago office. This would have meant setting up my own business and state licensing issues and such. Nothing I wanted to do for a part-time gig. So I walked away from it. After which a business I do own started to really take off so I made up the lost income. No tears.
But for the last year I have been having a reoccurring dream about my work there. I keep dreaming that I forgot about a meeting with a client and I’m in a mad rush to get there. Or I dream that I completely forgot about an assignment a client gave me over a month ago and I have just a day to get it done. Last night I dreamt I had sat on a file for the past 10 years and the client still wants the work completed.
What gives? I have these dreams at least 2-3 times a month, but they’ve only started happening over the last year. I haven’t done any work for that company for over 11 years. What do these dreams signify, and why would they start over a decade since leaving the place?
Has Covid changed your business success in any way to the point that you may have to revisit that old side hustle (as the kids today call it)?
You know how some people have dreams that they missed that one last exam in high school / college / grad school but it wasn’t caught and so they graduated anyway, and then years later the oversight was discovered and they’re suddenly stripped of all their degrees and are only qualified to flip burgers at McDonald’s? I’ve been having those dreams lately and I realize it’s because I fear my current employment situation is somewhat fragile. I think my dreams about failing grad school are directly related to worrying about having a steady teaching position next year.
Heh. Just the opposite. I own a gun store. Since Covid and Biden I can’t keep anything in stock. On top of that I am still employed as a LEO (2nd career in such, eligible for another pension in 2022). Financially I’m sitting real pretty.
I’ve gone over the usual causes for something like this and nothing fits.
I think it has nothing to do with the business itself. It’s just a variation on the dream where you have a final exam in a class you forgot to attend all term.
“‘I think those who have it tend to be professional and were successful students,’ says Judy Willis, a neurologist and teacher who lives in Santa Barbara, Calif., and who wrote about the dream in a 2009 Psychology Today blog post. 'These are people who have demanded a high performance from themselves. The recurrence of the dream correlates with times of stress and pressure, when people feel they have a challenge to achieve.’”
Any imagery and sounds in your dream may be random, or weakly associated with something currently roaming around in your brain. If it’s not totally random it could be that you forgot to take out the trash last week and invoked a similar memory from long ago at your job when you forgot to file the WENUS report on time.
Although I rarely retain details of my dreams for long at all when I have had something like a recurring dream I think the 2nd through nth occurrences are just an attempt to work out what the first one was all about.
I had a recurring dream for about a week recently, every night. Not for a year like you. In retrospect it was really obvious what it was about, but it took me some time.
Dream: I’m in some place with a bunch of strangers, some of whom I actually knew, many I didn’t. A friend of mine was there once. My now passed father was there once, which was unremarkable in the dream. We were in a place that was nobody’s home, seemingly a temporary setup. It was unclear why we were there, we were just trying to get on with it, put up with it. Once it was a big untidy house. Another time a big apartment building at the edge of the ocean.
For some reason several of the dreams included me trying to find my keys, wallet, phone and I couldn’t find them and was quite annoyed and it’d end with me looking everywhere for them.
In real waking life, the week after these dreams, there was a warning of “red flag weather”: possible fire weather like high winds, lightning strikes. I had the windows open that evening and smelled smoke. The first thing I did was take from my desk drawer my wallet, keys, phone and put them in a pile and wonder if I should pack the car.
I took a look at that pile: wallet, keys, phone, and muttered: “oh that’s what the dream was about!” Fear/anticipation of being evacuated because of a wildfire.
This was in September, and all through that August and September there’d been a fire raging about 15 miles from me. I knew at least one person who had evacuated. I’d packed my car in August once in fear of the same. It was the CZU fire north of Santa Cruz.