Last Night's Dream

I have several topics I wish to blog on today. Rather than lump them all into one incoherent mess (a la my first novel) I will separate them into distinct and meaningful blog posts.

Last night I had the strangest dream. It was funny, but the more I think about it, the more I start to psychoanalyze and wonder what exactly this dream tells me about myself and what's going on in my life.

In the dream, my coworker Tim called in sick. I'm at Sam's Club, getting gas, and I see Tim sitting in his car, obviously healthy as a horse. I go over to say hi, and he freaks out, terrified that I'm going to turn him in to our boss for playing hooky. I tell him not to worry about it, I'm not going to narc him off, but the entire time I'm talking to him, I'm wondering why he's so concerned about getting in trouble at work when there is a SEVERED FOOT sitting right on his passenger seat, which he seems to be blithley ignoring. Or is he completely unaware of it? Impossible to tell. I wonder where the dream would have gone, had it not been for my oldest waking up just then needing her sheets changed because she had peed the bed.

So for most of the day I have laughed to myself about this dream, but then I got to wondering. Maybe Tim is me. Maybe I'm trying to tell myself that I'm all worried about silly, nothing little problems when there is a severed foot type of problem staring me right in the face that I'm refusing to acknowledge. I'm just not sure what it is.

Maybe this: my older daughter and I have been fighting a lot lately. For the last 3 days, we've been unable to be nice to each other at all. This is a really really bad thing, because she is 3 years old and I am (supposedly) a grown up. I should be able to act like one. But she has been screaming and whining incessantly about nothing since Thursday. I have no idea what happened. It's like she just woke up Thursday morning and decided she hated me. She's not treating anyone else like this, just me. What happened? Is this the severed foot that I refuse to notice? Should I know why she's so pissed at me and I can't admit it to myself? Or is the fact that I can't seem to let her behavior roll off my back the problem? She's THREE people. That's how they act sometimes, right? But 72 hours straight of screaming, crying, whining, and general sullenness directed towards me alone has me exhausted. What did I do?

Or maybe this: I hate one of my jobs. I hate it so much. I want to quit so badly, but I can't because we need the money. Maybe that's the severed foot. I'm killing myself with this second job but there's no way out. We have zero room in our budget for cutting expenses. We have no entertainment budget, so we can't cut that. I guess I could take my oldest out of preschool to free up $195 dollars a month, but what could I do with that money to make life better? Nothing. It's best use is sending her to preschool. It's not like $195 bucks in my pocket would enable me to quit that job. My husband's being promoted sometime this year. He's been promised the promotion since like March, it's just really slow coming through. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping desperately that it will be enough money to replace one of my jobs, but seriously, his raise would have to be like 25K for that to be the case, and I just don't see that happening, even in my most deliriously hopeful moments.

Sigh. I have other candidates to fill the position of severed foot: my writing, my pursuit of an agent, the many responsibilites I have that I don't have time for, my lack of sleep, the friends I never see anymore, the master's degree I'd like to get but have no time for, etc. etc. etc. I would think on it more, but I have a meeting to run in 5 minutes, so I've got to get going.

I'll be careful while I'm walking. Maybe my dream wasn't metaphorical at all. Perhaps I should literally be concerned about losing a foot. Never hurts to cover all your bases people.