I dream regularly but I do seem to go through slumps where I will not dream for a long period of time, or at least I wake up not remembering what I have dreamed. Then for about a week I will dream almost every day and sometimes the dreams end up being a continuation of some dream I had earlier in the week.
This time the dreams that I had involved aspects of my life that actually were something that stressed me out when I was a kid but in the dream I don't know how old I was or if I was even me.
The first scenario is something I dream about very frequently. I am working in a restaurant but I do not know where anything is. The restaurant is always busy and I am completely flustered, my customers are normally being pretty nice to me but at the same time I hopelessly bogged down and unable to catch up because I keep forgetting my orders and I don't really even know what the place sells or where they keep anything when I am taking orders.
I was a waiter for a lot of my youth. At least in the US this is a great way to make some money and once you get good at it, it isn't particularly difficult either. But there is an expression in this line of work and it's called "I'm in the weeds" which I have no idea how that expression came into being but it means that I am really busy right now and cannot help anyone else and if anyone has time to help me it is desperately needed. If you have a good team in a real life restaurant then the others would come together to help out provided that you were the kind of person that would reciprocate.
I looked it up and as it turns out this sort of dream is so common that it has been given the name "waitmares" as loads of people that worked as servers have experienced the same nightmares even though most of them haven't worked in that industry for many many years. That is the case with me. I haven't worked in a stressful restaurant environment for 25 years or so but yet it still regularly pops into my nighttime psyche. If that doesn't show you the power of childhood trauma, I don't know what does! If you were a restaurant worker and want to see one of the articles, here is one!.
The second aspect of my most recent dreams also relates to something stressful that I experienced as a youth but this is far less widespread than working in a restaurant and being too busy.
In my other dream scenario, the deadline for a play that I have a speaking role in is coming ever closer and closer and I am the only person in the cast that hasn't memorized their lines. Not only have I not memorized them, I don't even know my character's name or have any idea what their personality is like. Frequently, in these dreams, I have the script with me and I am desperately trying to rush memorize it, only to immediately forget what I just read. Then I can't even find the right pages in the script although rehearsal is going on around me
The online interpretation of this aspect of dreaming reads more like a horoscope than an actual diagnosis, and it irritates me that there are medical "professionals" the even bother typing things like this.
"fear of failure, lack of confidence, feeling overwhelmed and unprepared" are things they will frequently say is what a dream like this is telling you and I hate when I see these things because that could apply to almost everyone in the world no matter what they are dreaming about.
For me, I was in a bunch of plays in high school. I liked being in the spotlight, but it was always a chore to memorize lines and it was something you really had to work on, often with people helping you. I continued this into college and I am sure I pissed off a few roommates when I asked them AGAIN to run lines with me.
It was also something that was really easy to blow off because like most other high school and college students, I did have other things to do other than just memorize lines and as the opening date of the play grew ever-closer, the director and your co-stars would start to get really annoyed and anxious along with you if you were asking for lines to be fed to you or if you were still checking the script at this point.
One particular competitive short play that I was in (yes, this is a real thing) the people in the play with me botched their lines while I was not even on stage yet and none of them knew what to do. I had to enter the stage early and do a modification of my own lines in order to save the show. But, by doing so it diminished my own performance because my character was a surprise one and by not having my proper entrance it took away from the overall look and feel of my character. There was a strong feeling that I was going to be nominated and possibly win for "best supporting actor" but because my own entrance appeared sloppy to everyone that was watching, I won and wasn't even nominated for anything.
I was pretty pissed off about that because to the people out in the crowd watching as well as the judges, it probably looked like I was late on my cue and not that what the reality was which was that I had rescued the entire damn thing by thinking quick and getting out there with no instruction to do so.
The question that remains though is why am I dreaming about these things now? It has been decades since I was involved in either of these things but every now and then my brain decides to torment me with the stresses from a long time ago.
I start to understand how it is that certain people with trauma that is far more impactful than working in a busy pizza place or having to memorize lines in a totally optional activity would possibly carry these bad feelings into their entire life and have it affect them very negatively.
When I woke up from the second dream about forgetting the lines in the play I was still very frustrated even though I was awake and aware of the fact that none of it was real. The feeling of frustration was so profound however, that I was too angry and frustrated to get back to sleep even though it was 3AM and just getting up would ruin the next day. Well, I had no choice. I was too angry to sleep and yes, it did ruin the next day as well.
have you ever had this happen to you?