A Scary Halloween Dream

Jack-o-lantern (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

       This past Sunday morning I had a very scary dream.  I dreamed that my Monday post  for my Tossing It Out blog had become infected with a virus from a website that was taking over my site with links attached to key words within my post.  I was not sure where the links would lead to and I was unwilling to click on them to find out. They seemed to appear randomly and each time I fixed one, another link appeared in its place.

      The night previous to the dream I had been finishing up "My Brain is a Blog", a satirical humor post with some serious controversy that was to be a sort of lead-in to Halloween and  my Battle of the Bands post for Friday November 1.   I had some concern as to how that post would be received since it was a rather peculiar one.  This concern was probably what caused my anxiety laden dream.   This is ironic considering that the subject matter of the blog post had to do with blogging taking over the brain of the blogger, but then again having a dream with this content might make perfect sense.  The dream may have been merely a subconscious recreation of my blog post infused with my sense of concern.

       The dream seemed very real and I was believing that what had happened in the dream was something that was actually happening to my blog.  Within the dream I pinpointed the source of the problem and decided to get rid of all of the nefarious links that had been placed by an evil program that I had tapped into the night before.  I also tried to figure out how to disable the program.  Each time I tried to fix the problem I would go back to check to see if everything was okay and at the bottom of my blog post I would see the message:

          "This blog has been infected."

      In the morning after waking and rising I went to my computer to just make sure there was not an actual problem with my blog.   All was well.   The dream seemed so real that I actually believed that what had happened in the dream was a true event.   It had all seemed so convincing.

      Thank goodness it had only been a dream.

Happy Halloween!

        Have you ever had a blog dream?    Does the intensity of a dream dilemma every carry over into the immediacy of awakening so that you have to check to see if something from the dream was true or not?   What real-life related fears enter into your dream life?   

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Dreams That Make Us Tired

dream... (Photo credit: Norma Desmond)

        IN the comment section of my previous post, Eve said:

 I've had dreams that seem to last for hours and hours...have you ever had a dream where you're running from something, or someone..it seems to last all night long, and when you wake up you're actually tired because you've been 'running' all night? 

      Thinking back on my own dreams I don't recall many times where I woke up tired after a dream where I was running from something--in fact, maybe never.  However, many times I have awakened from dream sleep feeling very worn out much as though I had spent a long hard day at work.  There was probably a good reason I felt this way when I woke up--I was dreaming of work.   

       In recent months I have been having an especially large number of dreams about work.   These dreams typically involve stress caused by not being on schedule or feeling pressured by upper management.  In some  of these dreams I may be back traveling with a road show as I did during the 1980's.  At times I am lost or delayed by peculiar events.   I realize that I will be late for the show and an audience will be waiting.  My tension is increased by confusion, indecisiveness, and forgetfulness.  I become frustrated because I am unsure of what to do or how to do things.

      In other dreams I am working in a scenario similar to the warehouse where I was manager in my last job.  There are things I can't remember--processes, products, product locations, customers, and even workers who I manage.  I attempt to achieve tasks that were once familiar to me, but now are things I no longer understand.   I am concerned about my job performance and fear repercussions from the company owners.  Losing my job becomes a burdensome worry in the dream.

      My interpretation relates these dreams mostly to my state of unemployment which I have been in for four years now.  During the first two years I collected unemployment and looked diligently for a job without success.  After the unemployment benefits ran out I gradually spent less effort looking for work and trying to consider other ways to make money.  I will begin collecting social security in March.  I still hope to find a good source of income, but if I don't then I suppose I can consider myself officially retired.

      The long period of joblessness would account for my sense of uncertainty if I were to rejoin the workforce.  Since my previous jobs were of such long duration, I use them as a reference point and model for any new job situation in which I might find myself.  In my dreams I return to the jobs that I have known in the past, but having been away leaves me with a sense of insecurity.  This sense of  insecurity and my own having forgotten what my jobs may have entailed leads to anxiety, apprehension, doubt, and stress.   A night filled with these encumbrances causes fretful sleep and mental turmoil which wearies me and causes me to wake up tired.

       Have you experienced similar dream sleep problems?   Do you ever awaken in the morning feeling tired as though you hadn't slept?   What do you think causes you to wake up tired?

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