Perchance to dream

So, I, like lots of other people now, have been having trouble sleeping – although I have not been a good sleeper since menopause, and normally get up every two hours. The problem now is that I often can’t fall back asleep, and when I do I often crash out hard for 15-30 minutes and have vivid dreams.

For example, somehow I’m in a situation where somebody I had crush on found out (the dream is non-specific as to who, except that they are male, and I never see their face …), and they let me know they knew by means of a note tucked into a red plush teletubby suit. This fateful note includes the news that the partner this person has chosen instead of me is pregnant, acutely hurtful, because while they are too old to have children, they are still physically capable, obviously, while I am also too old to have children and NOT physically capable.

Another example is I am driving in Pittsburgh and I have to get onto a highway where the entrance is a blind, steep, cement ramp – they have plenty of those in Pittsburgh – and for some reason I stop the car and get out, and it rolls down the ramp and smashes into a retaining wall. Doing severe damage, that I have to somehow explain to insurance and the cops is not my fault.

And a recent one is I am at a table with a group of ladies, it’s kind of like a hotel dining room, and we are having tea, but we’re also trying to look at a video of some kind of event on somebody’s laptop, because one of my old boyfriends, who one of the ladies knew in high school, is supposed to be there. This part is based on fact – my cooking buddy Terese went to high school in Green Bay with my first serious boyfriend in Wisconsin who I lived with for three years. He was one of the cute guys at their high school, so Terese was impressed when I told her we were together for awhile.

→ June 11 Update. Yesterday I was in an absolutely impossible meeting, although I, like the person leading the meeting, didn’t think it would be so impossible going in. It was 10 people who all work together on one floor of a University building trying to figure out how to make space for 6 new people who are starting in the Fall. On the face of it not an insurmountable problem because there’s actually only about one less office than we have people, but not all offices are equal – some have windows, some have better locations, some have a lake view, are just generally nicer ….But what really made it impossible is we’re all working at home during the pandemic, and we don’t know when we are going back, or how much space we will need going forward. And, people’s ability to work at home is a really squishy thing. Like do you need to go in for better Internet connectivity, or to get away from your kids,  or because you feel more productive when you are IN the office – plus working remotely being A-OK with management is kind of moving target, there are still residual memories of when you were regarded as productive IN the office, at home, not so much. So my dream this morning was trying to clean my office with its 20+ years of stacks of dusty journals and papers and general junk, so that it could be shared with someone else …

And what else … Flowers on a Monday walk, and food of course.