Staggering Dreams

That should be the title to a song!
But for me - it is just my reaction to my over active and over taxed mind, trying to sort out the difficulties and experiences I am having in the waking world.

Work issues AGAIN!
But this time they pervaded my subconscious mind. I woke up unsettled from my dream world for many reasons not least of which - I acted strangely out of character from my awake-self personality in more than one part of the dream.
Here’s the back story:
My current boss’s boss [I’ll refer to him as G] got himself arrested and in a heap of trouble by making poor choices in his personal life. Which I have mentioned previously on this blog. My current boss [R] – loyal perhaps to a fault, helped out this guy on the down-low: no one was really supposed to know that he spent hours at the bail bondsman and trying to spring G from the pokey.

This week R springs the news that he is resigning from his current position and taking a new job, much closer to home, with some of his dad’s cronies. It may or may not be relevant to the issue that he got our company through a very low spot when we were surely facing bankruptcy, and he managed to keep all our creditors at bay, although that was WAY outside the scope of his job description. It was possibly more along the lines of what his boss G should have been doing, instead of making poor choices in his personal life that bled over into his professional life and dramatically led to his eventual demise.
I’ll admit R wasn’t perfect [his Jew jokes were wearing thin and starting to irritate me for one thing], but he was fun to work for and flexible about most things, including letting me learn some new skills when the need arose.

Having gotten used to the idea that R was leaving, I went in to visit with his contemporary [wB] about some other work related issue. Over the course of this week we got to talking and he revealed that it is almost certain that he will be moving up the ladder – not to R’s previous level, but in a way that includes that I will be reporting to him and that we will be adding another girl to our dept to learn the ropes for when all our babies are hatched this summer. We also got chatting about all the people that have left our ranks (voluntarily or not) and what has become of them. He cited his dismay at one of our colleagues [B] that was one of the casualties of our “slow down” and has the distinction of being "the one that was sacrificially let go" from our dept. But in the next breath wB reminded me that B “landed well” as he "kinda keeps tabs on him" through a salesman that makes calls on both companies.

And in a different vein altogether, my past musician lifetime came back for a visit. It wasn’t entirely bad - it reminded me that I used to have a hobby [I think I always knew I wouldn’t make a grand living at it, I only had a lukewarm passion for it even at the peak of my “career” – sorry daddy] – and that it is sometimes a definite missing aspect from my life.
The younger brother of a friend of mine that was in the same grade as me and went to all of the schools I did, was recently in a contest through Crate and Barrel for an Ultimate Wedding Giveaway. He is a very talented musician out of Portland or Seattle and his fiancé was diagnosed with a rare cancer recently. With their wedding plans on hold, they signed up as a lark to take some of the pressure off. I was bombarded with reminders sometimes 2 and 3 times a day to visit the site and vote for them. And at one point I even felt compelled to publicize their story on my personal newsfeed.

Just a little reminder to those still reading: Happy Passover. I debated calling my learning partner to see how she is doing with all her family in for the holiday and thought that I might do better to leave her alone until they all leave.


So now onto the dream:
The setting is a one-room school house. I am clearly agitated but don’t know about what.
Then arrives a moustached man (whom I later identified as wB while discussing the dream with a close friend at work) There is no one else around but I begin physically beating this man up. He is obviously taller and larger than me, but he stands there and takes the pounding I am giving him without flinching or really holding me off. He does not cover any of the areas I am attacking or attempt to defend himself in any discernible way.
Once I have used up all my energy on this attack, "classmates" start to appear and "the teacher" - my learning partner - keeps them away from me. The moustached man has gone to tend to his bruises - I never really saw any blood and he was still standing and walking after my beating. Another gentleman swoops in to console me for what I did. He does not speak at all, only lets me collapse against him and shelters the rest of the "classmates" from seeing my shame and agitation. Never mind that "the moustached one" let me get away with it and that the "teacher" went on to sheperd the other students to a different place in the building and tried to get on with things as if nothing happened - giving the impression that things were well handled by "consoling man" and that she would check on things when she was more able to do so.

(I identified the consoling one as B at the same time I realized the moustached man was wB and also that this was my subconscious attempt to come to terms with the work-related "adjustments". One of the topics wB and I discussed that day was the fate of some of our former colleagues and specifically B which is why he was on my mind)

Same day, Act II:
The dream continues in a different setting altogether.
I am on stage in an orchestra setting and still upset over letting myself lose control and physically attack another person. (The other players are really irrelevant other than that there were there. I was aware that the red-headed boy, who I was always in school with-and not his younger brother, the afore-mentioned contestant with his fiancé in the wedding contest- was at the front of the viola section and I was somewhere in middle to the back of the section)
Towards the end of the rehearsal, or the movement, or the piece, I hurriedly walk off stage and am distraught, but not inconsolable, crying in the wings of the backstage area. It was not completely clear if it was a performance or a rehearsal. And the other musicians follow me offstage very soon after, but I could not get off the stage fast enough and even caused a bit of a ruckus in my leaving. It was VERY unlike me in any performance or rehearsal situation I can remember during my actual time as a musician. So that whole bit about me losing my composure in a different kind of "professional" [although a lifetime ago, as a professional-quality student musician] setting in itself was a bit disconcerting as well.

So there you have it - outside influences again pervade my subconscious self.
And my husband and kids who are so much a part of my waking and home life, but completely removed from my work persona are noticeably absent from these dreams.
Do I deliberately compartmentalize all the pieces of my life and is it so blatantly apparent to everyone else too? I wonder...
Thoughts and comments are appreciated but I won't claim to agree with them all outright.