Nightmares

If you know me well, chances are you know I tend to have pretty vivid dreams. By this I mean that most times when I sleep, I wake up with at least a faint recollection of having dreamed, and often a pretty clear recollection of what I dreamed about. (I usually have to talk about it almost immediately to retain the recollections, though, which doesn't happen so often since I haven't got roommates anymore and my family lives on the other side of the Atlantic.)

I also have recurring dreams; when I was a kid I was forever dreaming I was being chased by tv or literary villains, whose identities changed as I aged (ranging from the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk through Looney Tunes through Gargamel all the way up to Darth Vader). When I hit my mid-twenties, I dreamt often about being forced to marry some smarmy older guy I had never met before and was repulsed by. In my thirties, for some reason, my most-recurring dream has been that one where I'm in college, have signed up for a course I promptly forget about, and then the week of exams I'm suddenly freaking out trying to prepare for an exam and make up all the credit I've lost by not attending the class. As Former-Roommate-Rachel says about this kind of dream, "It's always about math." Yes. Yes it is.

Anyway, ever since quitting Starbucks in June last year, that recurring dream seems to have shifted setting, because suddenly Starbucks is turning up a lot. Right before Christmas I dreamed that the newish manager there had scheduled me for a week. I think Matty and Mouse noticed and caught on to the fact that, since I no longer worked there, no one would actually be filling that slot, and so they started trying to get people to fill it for the week, but in the meantime, I came in to get a coffee. The manager was out, and the shift supervisor on duty was someone I had never met but who somehow knew me, and she started browbeating for not showing up for my shift.

"Yeah," I said, "but I don't work here anymore. I quit."

"But you're on the schedule," she insisted. "You should at least have called around to get your shift covered."

"But I quit."

"But you're not working right now. Why don't you just come in and cover it? We need you."

"But . . . I'm not even on the payroll."

Fortunately at this point Matty the Hero came in and told her he had gotten all my other shifts covered. Some people are consistent to their characters even when they're in someone else's subconscious.

Then, about two nights ago, I dreamed that, because I'm so short on funds, I succumbed to working for Starbucks on Saturday nights only, just to get a little more income. They don't allow you to work one day a week anymore, but according to the Starbucks-in-my-sleep, because I was signing away every single Saturday night for, presumably, the rest of my life, they could make an exception.

I'm not even wondering what my subconscious is trying to work on right now. Are you?