Dreams are little more than what you are thinking about when you go to sleep. If you are anything like me than you work hard, and you think hard about the work you do, and subsequently you dream about work sometimes... or a lot, it really depends on two variables. How hard do you work, and how crazy are you. Again if you work as hard as me (no one does) than you have an intensity and pride that makes doing a perfect job take precedence over everything else in your life. Also you need to be crazy in order to live this way. Also you need to be crazy to invest the amount of time necessary to think about work so much outside of work to haunt your dreams.
Here are a few examples of dreams I have had where work was a major presence.
I was studying hard for a calculus exam and taking periodic breaks to watch the anime “One Piece.” This was before “One Piece” was known in North America, before it had been touched or translated by 4kids and sub-sequentially ruined. I went to bed hoping to get my average two hours of sleep a night and I began to dream I was navigating a pirate ship, only some asshole had made the ships controls only responsive to advanced mathematical equations, as if that was now seafaring was done. So I would guide the pirate ship along and dodge cannon balls with math, you know, cause that made sense. It was not a very good sleep. I did pass every calculus course I ever took though.
The sound of chit printer on a kitchen line. Working the line was vivid enough in dream to consume my thoughts and drive my imagination throughout my sleep with this one endless task, but there was one thing that was inescapable; the sound of the printer. Anyone who has worked in a kitchen knows what I am talking about. The sound of the printer is the sound of more work, and the sound rings and rings when you are busy. It becomes a bad omen after one too many busy lunches, and then it becomes a horrible echo that will not go away. As the heat and long hours wear on you, you begin to hear it even when it is no longer printing. Then you start hearing it in your fucking dreams! It took about as many years to get the sound out of my head as it did for me to grow hair on the fingers back after quitting my job as a chef. It took many years.
I worked an average of sixty hours a week for every week in December 2011 in a warehouse. The commute was so bad that I would lose roughly fifteen to twenty hours a week just getting there and back again. Needless to say, I was tired. At nights I would toss and turn in my bed thinking about skid picking, but I was trying really hard to sleep, and I was so tired. I began to dream that I had fallen asleep on the job and was lying passed out on the skid on the pallet jack I was using to pick dog food (I worked at a veterinary supply warehouse) and I was trying to pick product while sprawled out on my skid. It was a pathetic effort, and I am sure if someone awake was watching me squirm in my sleep they would have to wonder what my out stretched body was trying to accomplish. Lying on the skid and reaching out to the lot to grab product was difficult in the dream, which made sense, doing that would be difficult. The real lack of realism coincidence with the fact that I was able to drive the pallet jack around while lying on the skid, that’s just impossible. I guess exhausted sleeping Colin didn’t notice.
Recently I have been working a good job for a good company. This may not sound like a big deal, but since it is the first time in my life that either of those two variables as described have been present in my life it is pretty exciting to me. I work asset management, and record, name, tag, and place key assets in the company’s records. Small mistakes are easy to make, like recording a CRN number with an “OG” instead of “0G,” and then somebody has to go through and fix them all. I had this terrible dream someone had misspelled “Chinook,” as “Chinnook,” and I was going to have to go through thousands of records and fix them. Unfortunately given the nature of the assets and software program in use there is no easy way to search for an error like. Such a misspelling could occur in so many different fields of data and the auto-populate feature means it could be a reoccurring problem over many assets in many fields. So I was hunting the errors down in the dream and then we were attacked by zombies. This was the same night season 2 of the Walking Dead aired their season finale, so you can piece together what I was thinking about as I fell asleep. Getting attacked by zombies in the work place just seems appropriate to me. I fought zombies in the University of Calgary, at the restaurants I worked, in my office as a book keeper, in a warehouse, and even on a pirate ship. Every story should end with a zombie apocalypse. You never know when the zombies are going to show up at work, and I guess subconsciously I am ready for that.
It might seem that I work too hard and sleep too little, but frankly I enjoy crazy dreams like these, they make going to bed all the more interesting. Sometimes you dream about work. Sometimes you dream about school. Sometimes zombies show up. Whatever you are thinking about can and will happen in dreams.
