I dream frequently... nearly every single night. As I get older my dreams get to be a big confusing because since I rarely dream of fantasy or scary type situations, I will often not be 100% sure of what actually happened in my life and what happened in fantasy land. Me and a friend of mine had a real laugh the other day when I got the two worlds confused and was talking about something that didn't actually happen because it didn't happen to anyone other than me in dreamland. This is how vivid my dreams are to the point where I sometimes have difficulty remembering what was real life, and what is fantasy.
So the other night I had yet another dream that was so "scary" that when I did finally get jolted awake I couldn't get back to sleep because I was so flustered and frustrated from what had just happened in my head. I am a grown man and should be able to calm myself down after something happens that clearly wasn't real, but I guess I am just silly like that. I ended up waking up for the day even though it was 0230. I knew this was going to bite me in the ass come the afternoon, which it did. Thankfully I was able to get an power hour nap in and all was well.
Anyway, let's get into what it is that goes on in this crazy mind of mine that I find so terrifying in my middle age, shall we?
Short backstory: I've worked my entire life. Some of my earliest memories is of having a job. As soon as I could walk it seems I had a paper route and these jobs evolved over time until I was a teenager and I worked in food-service. The food service industry in America is one that is very welcoming to young people and if you ever hear about this "minimum wage" debate perhaps you can understand why I am on the side of the people stating that this should not be raised to $20 an hour. The people in most food service establishments are young people who likely have no financial obligations and this was never meat to be a career outside of the one or two people in the kitchen that actually know what TF they are doing. Those 1 or 2 people make substantially more than the min. wage kids and for good reason.
Anyway, so when I got to be a teenager and for most of my college years, I had a job in the food-service industry. It started out in a local seafood restaurant where I was a dishwasher but eventually and over time I realized that the real money was in the front-of-the-house jobs such as bartending and waitstaff. So me being the industrious person that I am, I strived to make my way to the front, which I achieved pretty early on.
The problem with front of the house that for the most part isn't experienced in the back is that when the place gets busy, you get overwhelmed on a regular basis with having too many things to do and remember at once. One small thing like the service area being out of ice can really set you back and stress you out because there is a good chance that all of your customers are waiting on something and they, the ones who likely never worked in food service, get all flustered and upset with you because they have to wait 2 minutes for an iced tea refill and they presume you are an idiot when the reality is that you have been assigned more work than one person should ever be in charge of. They do this on purpose for cost-savings. If they assigned a ton more servers that would solve the problem for me, but it wouldn't solve the problem for the restaurant since outside of peak times, there aren't enough customers to justify the regular amount of servers they have, let alone a surplus.
So those of us that have had this job end up "in the weeds" meaning that they really have to focus in order to simply manage to get every one of their customers what they are asking for. So many times IRL I have been in the middle of something only to suddenly remember that someone asked me for something 10 minutes ago and I simply forgot.
This stress of having that job sticks with me to this day and even though I have not worked in food service for many many years, it is always in the back of my mind.
During this stress, it is important as a server that you don't let the audience know how crazy it is what you do for a living. You aren't supposed to freak out on them even though you really want to. Plus, if you were to explain to them it would take a bunch of time out of your already crammed mini-schedule and get you even further behind plus, they probably wouldn't care.
So in my dream I found myself in an amalgomation of many different restaurants that I have worked at in the past and this particular one had a very complicated touch screen ordering system. In the dream I was basically assigned an area of the restaurant that was "my zone" and then thrown to the wolves. Nobody in the dream taught me where anything is, how to use the computers, or even what we sell there. Also, the restaurant was absolutely slamming busy.
There is one thing that I recall from working in busy restaurants and that is the fact that during busy times, even the most friendly of fellow staff members are unable to assist you with anything because they are busy AF as well. If you just try to get someone to help you out because you don't know where anything is, they will snap at you out of character and probably be overly mean to you because they are juggling 20 different things at the same time as well.
In the dream not only did I not know where anything was or what we sold there, but I also didn't know any of the staff. So I am just wandering around looking in this place and that for god knows what, and in that time not only am I not finding what I am looking for but I am also getting in the way of people that work there that DO know what they are doing. So they get frustrated with me as well. Every little thing I went in search of would be missing such as the ice tray being empty for the drinks that I finally figured out how to make. I also had no idea where one might obtain more ice so I'm just standing there like a useless lump.
In the meantime I am also very aware of the fact that for each minute that I spend standing there I am getting further and further behind as far as service is concerned. So I'm at a bad impasse in the dream: I can't go forward but the longer I continue to stand in one place I get further and further behind. I also have no idea how to use the computer system so I can't order any of the food that they sell in this place anyway.
For people that have never worked in food-service I can tell you that it is likely the most stressful job that you are ever going to have unless you serve in active combat military duty. My constant return to this job in my dreams kind of suggests that there is a certain amount of PTSD that exists simply from carrying food to tables.
It helped me to grow as a person IRL because I learned how to mitigate adversity and how to deal with unreasonably angry people who don't know all of the story. You really had to juggle so many things at once just to make it in that profession and to this day I have a great deal of patience and respect for anyone that has to work in that field.
I woke up from this dream at a point where I think I had resigned myself to failure, standing on the other side of the dining room with all of my customers basically shouting at me and me not having a clue what I could possibly do to placate them. I suppose my "fight or flight" mechanism triggered at that point and I was whisked out of the dream and returned to the real world where my doggo friend was busy snoring right next to me.
I realize the difference between the real world and something that just happened in my head. I'm not insane. However this feeling of frustration that I had in me after going through what was hours and hours in my head resulted in a feeling that I simply couldn't shake and was still extremely frustrated even though I was well aware of the fact that none of what I just witnessed actually happened. I got up, went and got a midnight snack and then tried to lie back down and return to slumber only to discover that I simply couldn't shake the feeling of immense frustration and eventually just decided to get out of bed for the day.
Has this ever happened to you? A dream so powerful that you couldn't get back to sleep?
The "experts" state that this sort of dream is quite common and it "can symbolize feelings of being overwhelmed and overburdened in your waking life." I gotta call bullcrap on this one again, I have a pretty carefree life in my awake world.