Dreamtime

OK, so "New" Blogger won't let you place an 'automatic' link in the title of the post. I'm irritated about the whole linking thing anyway, since I always get a reject from Microsoft about linking in "Edit" mode.

Anyway. Dreamtime is a concept I thought I remembered reading about somewhere. Unfortunately, the dream I was having this morning wasn't very optimistic about things. It was clearly a stress dream, though it was a funner stress dream than my usual one.

BACKGROUND:
Ask anyone who works closing anywhere public, be it store or library or whatever, and I'll bet you'd find they have the occasional dream about not being able to get the damn building closed up for the day. I used to have recurring nightmares about this when I worked for PsychoBoss. There were so many things she required beyond the basic "lock the doors, turn out the lights, make sure no one is left in the building when you leave" stuff: replace all magazines in the correct places on the displays, "face" each and every shelf throughout the adult area, count the money in the cash register/run a daily report/balance it out, have everything shelved that was returned that day, pull expired reserves off the shelf behind circ,... and the list went on. It was a fuckin' nightmare in real life much less in dreamtime.

So the recurring dream I had involved Sundays, which are notoriously chaotic because we are shorter-staffed and people seem to come in the same numbers as a regular day, except in only three hours instead of 10-12 hours. Closing on Sundays was hard because there are all those last-minute homework assignments. In PsychoLand, there was also only one adult working (all the circ staff on Sundays was teenage pages, no adults!) and that person was responsible for everything from answering reference questions to handling security issues (fights, broken things, flooding toilets, you name it) to supervising the circ staff and handling crises there to throwing people out the door at closing and making sure the post-closing stuff was handled. So that was reality. Usually it wasn't so bad, but worrying about it was all-consuming for each and every reference librarian.

The recurring nightmare itself involved people refusing to leave, finding people hiding in various places, disovering that people were getting inside after we locked the doors, not being able to find all the magazines, having 150 books left to shelve at closing time, not being able to balance the cash register...nothing terribly criminal or scary, just frustrating and annoying. I seemed to always wake up in the midst of a panic about making the pages work extra time (for which we didn't get paid--we only got paid till the minute the doors were supposed to be locked...any extra time was somehow "our fault"), sometimes amounting to hours and hours of extra time. Guilt? Yep; that was the era of it all being my responsibility, my fault, my problem to solve. I'm cured of that (mostly) now. Thanks, PsychoBoss, for that at least!

TODAY:
So I woke up this morning having the following dream:

I'm working a much smaller version of our current library with several of my current coworkers. Techie Librarian was there, as were several daytime circ staff. Techie and I were finding books for a lot of Large Print readers (no clue about that!), and generally winding down the day. The circ desk was smaller, and had just one checkout terminal, so there was a long line. Well, "long" for the library; it looked like a short grocery store line. And we were in sort of a grocery store building, similar to the smallest, family-owned, supermarket in town. There were lots of windows, and separate entrance and exit areas.

Then we closed. Except there were still people in line. Techie went home (actually, it being a dream, she just disappeared) [OK, in reality she does that quite often too.....hee...we joke about getting her a cat collar so we can find her] and suddenly the daytime circ people had morphed into the crew with whom I normally work Thursday nights: Alabama, Sout' Sider, Argentina et al. I was still helping people find things, and whenever I looked up, someone else was coming in the front door. There was no one free to lock the doors, so people just kept coming.

Suddenly, we weren't a library at all anymore, we were a grocery store! People were carrying shopping baskets (which we actually have at our library, by the way) and pushing carts. The line was going down: it was mostly one or two items at a time per person, but more people kept coming in. Someone finally managed to lock the doors, and I started herding people towards the front, but every aisle had people in it. I'd clear an aisle and go on to the next, only to find the first aisle had people in it again. I looked over to the entrance once and saw a very tall 'person' made of paper-clips ducking into the inner doorway. Then some antagonistic people came in to buy liquor and the checkers/circ people said they wouldn't let them: we were closed, sorry, go home, etc. Those customers got crankier, the desk staff just refused to do anything with them, and more paper-clip people (shorter than the first) were coming in because--I now noticed--one of the (glass-like-supermarket) doors was broken so it couldn't lock.

The last straw was three teens who came in to purchase the air hockey table (except it wasn't really air hockey, it was some other similar game that combined air hockey with foosball and basketball). Upon their entrance, everyone got very worried; they turned out to be nice guys, a little boisterous, but intent on what they were doing and not really troublemakers. They carried stuff (table, pucks and pieces, hoops) to the front, paid, and hauled it all out the door with my help, and I woke up.


What in the world!?!


Paper-clip people? I think that comes from listening to Inkspell; they reminded me of the glass man in that book.

Grocery store? OK, new marketing plots are swirling around the library, but hopefully we aren't aiming to be a grocery store just yet.

Panic about closing? I haven't had a dream about that for years. In fact, I've only really had that dream a few times over all the time I've worked at my current library (11-plus years) because it's so much less stressful than PsychoLibrary. Granted, I work until closing tonight, but I'm rarely on point for doing anything much about it beyond covering what others haven't gotten to. That usually means bathrooms and/or basement. No problem.

Where did this come from anyway? My shoulder hurting? Oy, so weird. The upshot is that there's tension at work, I think, but why it's coming out in such a bizarre dream I have no idea.

As I said, this was probably the funnest stress dream I've ever had (yes, I know it's not a word). I was kind of laughing when I woke up, and my heart rate wasn't up. Paper-clip people. Huh.

:-)

Appended: Just found that today's quote of the day is quite apropos: "Look for the ridiculous in everything and you will find it. - Jules Renard"