Help Wanted

I worked the night shift at two different jobs last week and I never got out of bed.

The activity was all in my mind in the form of two back-to-back work-related dreams that were so realistic I’m wondering if I should keep my resume on the nightstand.

I know I blog about my dreams a lot, but some of these midnight mind mirages are just so twisted I can’t keep them to myself.

Now to be honest, these two occurrences weren’t nightmares, certainly not like some of the high octane screaming mimis I’ve had in the past that packed enough psychic energy to power the Empire State Building.

These, on the other hand, weren’t particularly bad dreams. They were just kind of…unpleasant.

The first one had yours truly working at a temp agency doing some kind of brain-numbing grunt work that a NASA chimp would've found insulting.

The events are vague—I think I was stuffing papers into envelopes at one point--but I remember quite distinctly the feeling of despair and depression I used to feel back in my struggling days…which was pretty much all of them.

I recall working pointless, dreary jobs knowing that I had no future and would be unemployed again in a short time.

So, I woke up, shook off the dream and went to my real job.

I probably would’ve forgotten it entirely if it weren’t for another workplace delusion that came slithering into my subconscious the very next night.

Working Overtime

This time I was getting ready to leave New York and move back to Pennsyvania to work at my old newspaper.

I had spent five long years at this outfit and I was so grateful to get the hell out. I ended up going to a place that was almost as bad, but we’ll save that for another dream—God forbid.

I was so unhappy in this latest dream. I tried telling myself that it was really a good thing to take this enormous step backwards, but I knew that this wasn’t even remotely true.

And on top of these two events, I had yet another dream several months ago where I had returned to my weekly newspaper in Brooklyn where I had worked in the mid-Eighties.

So, what’s it all about, Alfie?

Well, like anybody else who isn’t a South African billionaire, I’m worried about my future. I had planned to work for another two years before retiring and collecting Social Security, but the DOGE douchebags are clearly bent are destroying those plans.

I’m concerned about my current job--which I like very much--since we live in troubled times, and I work in a highly competitive industry.

Almost two-thirds of Americans report having nightmares about their job, according to a 2018 survey of 1,750 working U.S. adults conducted by SleepZoo, a sleep tips website.

I found a post on Reddit from 2021 where the author said that he had bad dreams about returning to his last job.

"I had a lot of stress and anxiety with that job and it was some of the worst time I’ve had in my life," the writer said in a post that sounded all too familiar. "I was going to get written up but they kept saying things like 'I could just fire you', so I told them why don’t they and they thankfully did. I wasn’t sad to lose the job, I wanted to get out of there for a while but was too exhausted/scared to apply for anything else."

I try to rein in my fears during the waking hours, but when the sun goes down, my inner worry wards come out to play merry hell with my nerves.

I just wish they'd find a better-paying gig.