Published November 21, 2023
Everything vulnerable that’s important to me seems to be under relentless attack. My fears continue to be fodder for my nightmares. I don’t know what to say anymore. They keep happening, and they linger for longer because they feel more real than ever.
They suck so much out of me. It can take hours or even days or weeks to put enough distance between them and myself so I can function without them dragging me down. The one I woke up from at 3:30 this morning feels like one of those, even though it probably will read to others like, “Oh, I have had that kind of dream. Everyone does.”
In this one, I found myself at work at one of the newspapers I used to work at, although not in a single-desk office as in the dream. The office had a partial wall in front of the desk but had spaces on either side of the wall where people could walk in without knocking or having to open a door. There was an even bigger open space behind and off to the side of me, so there was hardly any privacy. I don’t want to waste time trying to describe it in detail because I don’t think I can. It was unlike anything I recall seeing in real life.
A woman who worked in the newsroom at that paper, but not as a reporter or editor, was at the desk finishing up the page layout of a section front. The design was also unlike anything I remember us doing there, and I was trying to make sense of it. It looked finished to me, but she said there were things I needed to do before sending it to be printed.
Then she left.
Soon after, I noticed the screen kept going away because of some vexing dream-world screensaver, and I couldn’t figure out how to view it again. People began wandering into the space — not staff members, but people who seemed to be floating in and out of a room like they were at a party — and they began messing with me. They pushed against my back, toyed with me, moved the things on the desk, and kept laughing at me.
They rearranged what was on the desk, to the point where the computer seemed to have been replaced by an old business machine of some kind. It changed into different forms of different things, and I had no knowledge of how to get the page back to finish the layout. I kept looking to hit Ctrl+P, thinking that would bring up the mode I needed to send it for printing, but there was nothing resembling a keyboard.
There was loud, annoying lobby music, and it ratcheted up my anxiety as I realized the deadline was coming up. “Why is that music playing?” I yelled out. “Can we get it turned off?” No, I was told, it’s important. We need it. I didn’t understand. And who were these people?
I looked for a cheat sheet with instructions, maybe taped to a pullout panel above one of the desk drawers. There was nothing like that. I had it in my mind that the deadline was 11:30 and that it was getting closer, but there was no clock that I could see. I expected someone to come storming in to let me know I’d blown deadline.
Reporters I’d worked with there came to mind. Could I call them at home this late and ask if they knew how to finish the layout and send it along?
Two or three women showed up, not from the newsroom, and started talking about the city and others in Louisiana. I told them it was weird to hear the names of cities there because I no longer lived there. “I live in Washington state,” I said. “I go to Portland all the time. It’s close to where I live.” And then: “I don’t even work here anymore.” And one of them laughed and said, “Right? We know. Isn’t that funny?”
No one told me I’d be doing work on page layouts today, I explained. I can’t even find my reading glasses. I wasn’t prepared for any of this. I’m a writer and editor, and I haven’t done pages in years. I’m not up to speed on how it works, especially here. They didn’t seem to get the sense of urgency. By this point I was sure deadline had passed.
And where is everybody? Why did they think I could finish this page with no background, no context, no instructions. They just threw it at me and expected me to get it done.
Then I woke up and began to realize I’d been dreaming. And a weird thing happened.
My eyes were still closed, and I knew I was awake, but I could see flashes of what looked like countless computer screens running many calculations and equations per second, with flickering numbers, words and patterns, one after another after another. It was frightening, and I forced my eyes open to try to return to a sense of normal. My heart was racing.
I went to the bathroom and then returned to bed, picked up my phone and dictated what I could remember of the dream. This thing I said stands out hours later: “There were so many jerky people who came in and out of the room to fuck with me.” I kept saying, “Please leave” in that muffled way I speak in dreams, my voice struggling to be clear and be heard.
And then I wondered if I had been yelling loud enough for my neighbors across the hall to hear.
“It was all so surreal and also very real,” I said into the phone’s audio notes app. “I felt so helpless.”
I don’t remember what I was wearing in the dream, how I was presenting, what my gender expression was. Throughout, I was bullied, verbally and physically. Taunted. Mocked. It was excruciating and went on for seemingly such a long time.
“It was so terrifying, but mostly frustrating and made no sense. It was like a sort of, sort of, sort of, sort of version of the paper. Things I said aligned with reality, but the rest of the dream was a twisted version of what work is supposed to be like.”
It wasn’t the first time I dreamed I was back years later to work at one of the papers from early in my career. This was the most unsettling, the only one I recall feeling like a nightmare, and it was striking upon waking just how long it lasted.
“Things I don’t even have the vocabulary for,” I dictated, “flashing in front of me, but with my eyes closed after I woke up. The strangest shit.
“I’m so shook up. Oh my God. I need to write about this.”
It’s 11 a.m. as I wrap this up. I have a medical appointment in three hours. My plan had been that by now I would be done outlining topics I need to discuss, but after that nightmare, nothing was going to be possible until I tried to write my way through processing this.
I’m sure it seems mild, almost comical, reading it. My life was not in danger. I didn’t drive off a cliff. There were no monsters. Everyone has dreams about showing up for work or school on the day of a final exam or to do an important task and being unprepared. This was scarier than those, perhaps because of the bullying. But whatever the reasons, it was frightening beyond my ability to articulate it. And it will stay with me for a long time, I can tell. They all do now.
They steal so much from me. Time. Energy. Hope. Plans. Agendas. The ability to hold space for the part of me that wants even a modicum of control over what remains of my life.
I’m so tired.
Image of a girl in bed having a nightmare by Yuganov Konstantin via Shutterstock.