Last night I dreamed that I was a returns clerk in a Sears store. I spent the entire dream filling out return forms for customers. Oddly enough all the customers were co-workers. Is that pitiful or what?
Well, have you ever dreamt that you were sleeping?
I have dreamt that I was dreaming. Seriously.
A few weeks back, I dreamt that I woke up and was tired but couldn’t go back to sleep because I had to go to work. Then I woke up. I was tired but couldn’t go back to sleep because I had to go to work. I hate my brain.
Last year I started a thread pitting my brain because of boring dreams. In the dream that sparked it off, I was standing in a store and couldn’t choose between two different towels I wanted to buy. That was it. The dream was about a half hour long, subjectively. F’ing brain.
Oh God, that’s funny slortar. 
I have disturbing dreams about my work too. I noticed they seem to come often if i had finished a late shift. The dream would be about the store is closing, and there are still over 20 people lined up to the register, and they all have problems and it takes forever.
This was driving me crazy until one night, i realized it was a dream (something was out of context…like Arnold Schwarzenegger was my manager) and since then, whenever i dream about nightmare-work, i realize it’s not reality, so i start to shout, swear like a drunken sailor, hit people…and…umm…blood ensues.
What? me? Therapy? Naaaaahhh.
At least i started feeling better. I’m able to vent out stress and frustration (from work) in those dreams. Better than a real therapist.
Jeeze, I wish I would get some boring dreams…
Last night I had a dream that involved a fire breathing dragon (don’t ask me, ask the dragon) that woke me up and almost gave me a panic attack. I got back to sleep in time to watch a comet strike some city…
You need to find your archetype!
Read The Spontaneous Fullfillment of Desire by Deepak Chopra.
Try identyfying yourself with a heroic archetype- ever see Evil dead? Bruce Campbell’s S-mart Salesman (Ash) may be a more exciting type of salesman.
Were the co-workers in the dream co-workers in real life?
What were they returning and what were their reasons for returning them?
I had this same dream on a regular basis when I was a kid. I would dream that my mom woke me and I would go through my whole morning routine. I would usually just be leaving the house when my mom would wake me for real. Occasionally I would get all the way to school, and invariably it would then transition into an anxiety dream. There’s a test, I don’t have my homework, I can’t find my classroom, I forgot my pants, something like that.
Anyway, I really meant to weigh in on the topic of boring dreams, I’ve had some doosies in my time. When I was a microfilm clerk (like a file clerk, but without the excitement) I dreamt constantly about work. Especially while I was a lowly camera operator.
My job went like this. I have a stack of paper in front of me. Above is a camera pointed down at the top sheet. I push a button ::click::. Now I remove the top sheet and move it to another pile (remembering to check for printing on the back side). Now I push a button ::click::. Repeat for about two hours. When the little orange light goes on I change the film. (This, btw, is one of the highpoints of the day because I get to sit and do nothing for 3 minutes while the spool winds up the trailer, then I get to walk 15 feet and trade the exposed roll in for a fresh one.) Now I go back to filming.
After doing this for a while you develop a parsimonious movement (and carpal tunnel!) that you repeat each time. And that’s what I would dream about. My dreams would be looooong stretches of just filming. Click, flip. Click, flip. Click, flip. In general, dreams only last about 15 minutes at the most, but this would seem to go on for hours.
Very occasionally, I would dream about the worst thing that can happen to a microfilm clerk, which is where you didn’t spool the film properly and when you open the camera it all boils out into a great big useless heap of celluloid. In real life this is a hideous inconvenience because the whole roll has to be redone, and after the first filming some subtle information about the records is missing (like staples between files), but in my dreams it was often a huge relief from the monotony. (This only happened to me one time in real life, BTW. That’s not a lesson I had to learn twice.)
I only ever had one dream about that job that wasn’t boring. And that was after I had been promoted to a position where I was in charge of the computer indexing department, I managed one or two other people and I wandered around a lot troubleshooting processes. In that dream I LIVED at work (which wasn’t funny) and there was a snack-bar window thing that, in reality, belongs to my highschool. And I was wearing rollerskates.
(Hrm, as I was thinking about the indexing room, I just remembered a dream I had in the last couple of days where I was visiting the indexing room, and chatting with the girl who replaced me. That’s weird.)
Looking back on this post, I see that I have successfully captured the boringness aspect. Perfect.
You want boring? One of my two most common recurring dreams is not being able to dial a phone correctly and having to redo the number over and over. It used to involve those horrendously long code numbers you have to punch in for prepaid phone cards. Now I’ve updated to cell phone nightmares.
Last night I was having a lovely dream in which we had all gone to Greece for the weekend and I was wandering around a beautiful rose-covered villa. Well, it was so nice, I decided to call my parents and tell them all about it.
I spent the rest of the dream trying to dial the stupid phone. I even remember thinking, inside the dream, “Boy, this is just like one of those really annoying dreams…”