The Tedium of Dreams

[tealin]

I am no stranger to the anxiety dream. Usually these start a month or two before I'm due to travel somewhere, and involve losing an important item or not getting to the airport on time. I've been having a certain amount of real-life travel anxiety lately, around getting (or not?) a work visa for my usual teaching gig in Denmark. I don't know if this is too advanced for my lizard brain to process, or if it just doesn't know how to translate vague bureaucratic uncertainty into something to panic over, but somehow the usual airport anxiety has been translated into ... bus anxiety. Falling asleep and missing my stop. Missing my stop, getting off at the next one and crossing the street to catch the bus back the other way, but there are no buses going the other way. Not realising how close my stop is and having to scramble to gather up more stuff than I could possibly have carried aboard, and not having sufficient bag or arm capacity for it all. Usually this takes place in Vancouver, I suppose because that's where I took the most buses.

Last night, the usual bus problems were compounded by a trip back to my old houseshare in Cambridge, where I was supposedly still paying rent for my room even though I didn't live there, and discovered a great pile of mail for me on the counter – mostly junk, but a few returned envelopes and a some other things of interest. I had to sort through it while Troublesome Housemate hovered awkwardly behind me, and the sound of very young and raucous undergrads bounced around the house. And then it was back on the bus for another misadventure.

What is it like to have fun fantasy dreams that throw crazy stuff at you, instead of the most tedious or uncomfortable aspects of waking life? I feel like I'm missing out here ...

Comments

[tealin]

I think the weirdest thing to have happened in a travel anxiety dream, for me, is the door to my hotel room being too small for a normal sized human being to get through. Not just short, more like the size of one of those niches in the wall of a medieval church. Other than that, the weirdness comes in cities not quite being a real city (a hybrid London/San Francisco is common), or train lines that don't exist, or other inventions of my subconscious to fill a hole not supplied by memory. Climbing up a chute while dodging frozen pieces of necropsy specimens would be a MFA by comparison!