How does your current or former work life show up in your dreams?

Often my dreams will harken back to my hospitality days, bartending, cocktailing, waiting tables, stuff like that. The dreams tend to be very literal, and usually highlighting odd mistakes; a drink made with the wrong liquor, food spilled on someone, stuff like that. They tend to happen when I have had unpleasant interactions with family members.

I have dreams where I am back in a library doing reference work. Sometimes its the library I worked at and sometimes more amorphous. They are pretty literal. My dreams tend to be fully fleshed out stories – almost movies – which is why I’m often tired in the mornings.

Mostly in my nightmares.

Just the various routine duties, from climbing out of a manhole, to walking through a company building, to walking out of a customers building and trying to remember where I parked.

Everything comes together in a kaleidoscope. My 6 years of college plus 18 years in the US Army plus 20 years of working civilian hospital labs are all mixed together. People who never met are working together in places they’ve never been. So bizarre. No rhyme no reason.

I have a lot of anxiety dreams in which I am way behind on a project or I don’t have the proper tools to get it done.

Last night I dreamt that I had driven into NYC to work at an insurance company. I had to stuff envelopes to be sent out that day and I realized that I wouldn’t finish until rush hour and would have to drive home then. That dream had about a gazillion of my top anxieties in it (luckily there wasn’t a fire in the mix.) I was stuffing envelopes for “Get out the Vote” before going to bed and I had worked at an insurance agency but the rest was whole cloth.