Worrisome Dreaming

I've been having trouble lately putting together what's up with my dreams. Usually it's just so cracked-out and insane I don't have to question it, or it's cracked-out and insane but relevant in a way that makes sense. Lately I've been having dreams that are really, really vividly real and scary/stressful in very strangely banal ways. For example, I had a dream a few days ago that I was... I actually don't remember what I was doing, but it involved working outside of a school cafeteria well after dark, and as I was walking down the sidewalk on my way into the school I remembered that when I filled out my volunteer paperwork for the Chicago Public Schools I'd forgotten that I actually had been convicted of a felony. The rest of the dream was existential angst about how nice it'd be if it was all a dream and I hadn't really been convicted of a felony, and resigning myself to making my case to the principal about the oversight and having to get fingerprinted in order to keep volunteering, and feeling really guilty and embarrassed for whatever it was I'd done. My dream was very vague on the details of my felony, but it seems to have had something to do with my job. Why, of all the things to worry about in the CPS volunteer paperwork my subconscious thinks I've forgotten about a felony conviction, I don't know. Unless it's a metaphor for me having tuberculosis and not knowing it or something.

And then, the night before last I had a dream that my bosses had hired someone new, probably an attorney, who had taken it upon themselves to antagonize everyone at work that I liked. There wasn't much to it that I can remember, except that most of us were by the copy machine when she came in and tried to slap one of the other girls. I confronted her and launched into this embarrassingly terrible speech about how I didn't want to be, but I was responsible for these people and if she wanted to make their lives miserable she was going to have to answer to me and I could get her into a lot of trouble. And then I apologized for how corny the speech I'd just made was, because I was also terrified of her and knew that not only could she get me into just as much trouble, she was also going to laugh at me for trying to be all noble.

That one's a little easier to work out, I guess, given the current situation at work (which has devolved into a situation where a lot of people are passive-aggressively duking it out middle-school style, with back-stabbing and tattling). But why the fake antagonist? And why was I so afraid of them? (Why can I not stop dreaming about work?!) I am not a fan of this development. I want my Batman v. Cold Query dreams back!

And then there are mornings like today, when I woke up from seemingly no dream at all, and the first thought in my mind was "Of course! He'd be the Doctor!" Sigh.