I retired at age sixty-two. I’m very fortunate to have achieved that goal a bit early, if at all. My parents never did.
Not only did I retire into the path of the largest hurricane ever to come out of the Atlantic (Irma) and into the waiting arms of the most life-altering virus since the Russian Revolution, but I moved over thirteen hundred miles from the place I called home for over sixty years. That necessitated recruiting all new doctors, generally from online searches, in a place where the clientele needs golf carts to make the journey from parking lot to waiting room.
It’s no wonder so many medical office receptionists turn into unsmiling automatons in Florida. They face a slow, steady stream of achy, complaining patients from sun-up to sundowners. It’s a particularly cranky time of life in God’s Waiting Room. And although I managed to survive this gauntlet on my latest checkup, it offered my whippersnapper of an Osteopath, who thinks he’s a real doctor, a chance to comment that my lipid profile looks amazing but, “It would be irresponsible of me if I didn’t mention that…” Pause for effect. “…there are no FAT ninety-year-olds.”
I thought back to the waiting room. He’s right. Jerk.
But I digress, another symptom of life in which every day of the week is Saturday. Honestly, we just say that because it sounds like fun. Every day of the week is actually Tuesday, I think. And therein lies the singular value I can assign to having worked for almost forty years. The days had structure, and each sucked to varying degrees depending on its proximity to Friday.
I was dreaming about work again last night, much like the journeys I have taken for decades through the halls of my high school and college. In those dreamscapes I was generally naked and staring at a combination lock I couldn’t open, or arriving on the last day of the semester without a clue as to why I haven’t gone to class until the day of the final exam, which I am late for, in a room that’s written on a class schedule I can’t find. The question is, do I miss these places, or am I working through long held fears of failure and of being exposed as a complete fraud?
Flavor my new recurrent middle-of-the-night thrill ride a bit differently, and with a happier outcome. I am somewhere near my desk. I liked my desk. I kept a bowl of candy there. People visited, even ones who didn’t particularly care for me. Ah, the power of chocolate.
The dreams have evolved, coinciding with a news story about returning to work after the pandemic and how different it may be. Employers might insist upon sharing desks in open spaces that maintain distance and create a flexible timeshare sort of arrangement between workers who used to value their privacy. News flash: they still do! Workers will hate this setup if forced to return after months of Zooming with no pants, endless supplies of coffee made exactly the way they choose, and no one messing with the supplies or leaving things for the next guy to wash.
So, my real office was a fairly safe space, and I’m almost enjoying it in my dream when I realize I’ve been coerced into working on a large, multifaceted project with a deadline that’s utterly ridiculous and with almost no budget. Yeah, the kind of “opportunity” clients would predictably bring me on Friday after pushing it around their desk for perhaps three weeks.
These work dreams are becoming more layered, nuanced and real. In the most recent episode I approach my old office early in the morning. Someone is at my desk. In fact, a bold nameplate indicates that it is definitely no longer mine. A nicely dressed woman has been given my management job. Well, it’s about time! I’m impressed by her youth and intimidated by her sidelong glance. I back away, apologizing for the interruption.
Work is now structured like college, complete with long hallways, separate buildings, elevators that go all the wrong places and sneering, unfamiliar faces that scan my uncombed hair and outrageous attire. Oh my goodness, work and college nightmares are coalescing!
My attire! I’m wearing bright red-striped short-shorts, unusually white gym shoes and a tank top. I’m looking far too much like a Richard Simmons exercise video to be at work. I press the elevator call button and realize that I don’t know where my next hour of work or my next desk is located. I return to my first wrong desk and collect a small cardboard box of my colorful personal effects. By the way, if you dream in black and white, you were not human in your previous life.
My car keys are missing!
Back on the elevator, I exit, somehow in the corridor of a hospital, an intensive care unit where beeping and swooshing is background for hushed conversations. I look out the window at a brightly lit, snow-covered parking lot. I need to go home and get my clothes. Still no keys.
At this point stress is elevating my heart rate, the speed at which I take shallow breaths, and I realize that not only do I not know which building I should be in, I can’t remember what floor I’ve exited. I try to calm myself, duck into the nearest bathroom to wipe the sweat from my forehead and am immediately confronted with a tiled sub-nightmare, as if passing from one level of a role-playing video game to the next, having chosen to apply the wrong token.
It is a filthy apocalypse of dark, putrid fluids and unclean sinks. I can’t get out of there fast enough. I look down at my box of effects once more and consider the possibility that I am having another work nightmare, the off-ramp to lucid dreaming.
I shake myself; I shake the box. My keys jingle and rise to the surface of my collected things. Thank goodness, because this is no dream. It is real. But of course, it is not. I head to my car. Where did I leave my car?
But here’s the cool part. In my most recent dreams, the horror of the experience jolts me into a state of semi-lucidity. Not really a dream within a dream, but an awareness that I’m not unlike Howard Beale and “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” And since I realize in the dream that I retired years earlier, I loudly and gleefully exclaim, “You know, I’m retired. I don’t have to be here!”
And then I wake up, relieved, breathing hard. Perhaps my CPAP came loose on my face. Or maybe the power went out briefly. I’m gasping for air, heart racing and happy to be awake.
It was a dream after all. I never have to go to work again, until tomorrow night. For now, I’m ready for another Saturday, or Tuesday. It doesn’t matter.
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