I’ve been having it for maybe a year and a half, and it’s getting to be more and more frequent. It’s upsetting to me while I’m dreaming it- I feel a lot of anxiety during this dream. In the dream, I look at the clock and it’s usually between 10:30 and 1:00, during the day, and I realize that I haven’t gone to work. I can’t figure out why I haven’t gone in and I didn’t even call. I try to think of plausible excuses- I was in a car accident- no, then I won’t be able to drive my car to work tomorrow… uh… uh… I can’t think of anything! Why didn’t I go to work?! Why didn’t I call?! Here I’ve spent three and a half years at my job, trying to establish myself as responsible and trustworty, and now I’ve gone and done something bone-headed to erase all that in one day! I get really worked up in the dream- it’s very upsetting.
What, if anything, do you think this dream means? I’ve tried to make it stop by telling by boss about it, and I’ve gotten from her a free pass to actually do this and not get fired, hoping that having the free pass will stop the dream. It didn’t work.
Any thoughts? Alternatively, you could give me a good excuse to use in my dream next time.
I don’t know your past, or why you’re working yourself so hard on this front, but relax, you’ve achieved your goal. Your boss approves of you. She has given you permission to be “irresponsible” for a day, as per your dream, without changing her view of you as a responsible and trustworthy person.
That’s the key. You’re beating yourself up trying to be something that you have already established yourself as being. You keep pushing and pushing at it, convinced that you have not achieved this goal, and your brain is reacting by displaying those anxieties in your dreams. You are experiencing them there so that you will not have to experience them in the real world, because you insist on being afraid of it actually happening.
You are a responsible and trustworthy person.
Your boss believes it. It’s time that you did too.
If the dream persists, try lucid dreaming. Tell yourself, again and again, that if it happens again, you want to know that it’s a dream. It might take a while, but eventually you may go lucid in the middle of the dream and realize that it is a dream while it’s happening. Don’t get frustrated if it doesn’t happen. It may not, or it may take a while.
If it does happen… LAUGH! Laugh loud and hard in the middle of the dream and intentionally go back to bed (in the dream, that is).
Actually, what my boss said was that, knowing me and my history there, she’d automatically assume that something was very wrong, and she’d send someone to my house if I didn’t answer the phone.
Last night I tried the lucid dreaming thing- but my brain got back at me for it. It told me that this time it was really real, it was not a dream. I spent the whole dream thinking it was really happening.
Tonight when I go to bed I’ll try to meditate on the fact that I am responsible and trustworthy, and maybe it’ll sink in. If I have the dream again, I’ll try the lucid dreaming technique again.
The only thing I can think of is that on one hand my job is increasing in responsibilities and I’m getting further entrenched there, but on the other hand it’s a very dysfunctional environment and I have a lot of ambivalence about staying there, while at the same time I work very hard to maintain a level of competence and conscientiousness because that’s just my personality.
I think a part of me does sometimes just want to not go in and not call. To me that’s the ultimate “f you” to a job. Yet I would feel awful if I really did that.
Maybe you should just take the day off, since you won’t be fired.
But looking at your last post, I get the feeling that you don’t like your job. Find a new job, where you actually want to go to work.
I am not a dreamologist, but this sounds like a variation on classic school/work anxiety dreams (my own, repeated at infrequent intervals but persistent, involves having to go back and repeat medical school (braaaagh!), but being late to class, not knowing where my classes are or having missed many of them and facing exams).
If you can arrange to have some of the stressful aspects of your job alleviated, I’d bet you’ll have less trouble with your dream.
I have that one less often than the student ones, but I do have it. In mine, I am trying to get ready to go to work but keep getting distracted or delayed, and every time I look at the clock it’s hours later. Usually it also involves my not being able to get fully dressed. :o
My version of this dream is being back in college on final exam day and realizing that I have just forgotten to go to one of my classes for an entire semester. I didn’t cut the class or anything, I just forgot about it and now I have to go take the exam.
I don’t think it is a fear of people thinking you are not responsible or anything like that, I think it is a fear of being unprepared. Convincing yourself you wouldn’t get in trouble for it doesn’t matter because the fear is that it will happen at all, not the reprocussions of not showing up to work/missing a class/etc. Do your best to alleviate those fears. Maybe get a second alarm clock or something to ease your mind and know that you have prepared as much as you can and that there is nothing else you can do about it and the dream will probably stop.
I used to have that one a lot. I got myself kicked out of one school for screwing off and not going to classes, and got a mediocre GPA from the school I graduated from because I didn’t screw off as much.
Fast forward 18 years, and I’m in a position where I need a MS to continue in the career track I was in, but I was laughed at for trying to get into grad school with the GPA I had in hand, despite stellar grades on grad level coursework I was taking at the time. I bit the bullet, and got a second BS in a closely related field to #1, but formalizing the area I was really working in. Despite the pressures of career, a terminally ill mother, a mortgage, and raising a teenager, I got a GPA good enough to get me into grad school.
The anxeity may not be related to work at all, but maybe to something a lot more deep-seated that your subconscious is still supressing. Your subconscious may be taking some deep anxiety and projecting it onto a “safe” and obvious milieu like work.
I was wondering about that, Larry… my workplace is fraught with drama, with my immediate supervisor being batshit insane- it’s especially dramatical right now- but my personal life isn’t, so I can’t think of what it could be outside of work.
Whatever it is, it must be gonna come to a head soon, because I’m having that dream a lot more lately than I ever did. And since I had the last one, on Friday or Saturday night, it’s been hanging on me- I can’t get it off. I feel so disturbed in my dream, I can’t even describe it. I’d almost rather be having the one where I’m being chased and have to find a hideyhole, and that one’s scary. The feeling in the dream is awful.
