No rest for the freaked out

Whenever I sleep — and I mean whenever, and that includes my dinnertime power naps — I'm having nightmares about work.

Not necessarily about losing my job (though those are in the mix, too).

Mostly about stupid stuff, like not getting the last plates out 'til 6 the next morning; my boss forcing me to go have coffee with her and gossip about "Jon and Kate plus 8" when there are ten minutes left 'til deadline and I'm nowhere near being done; my boss' boss deciding at the last minute to do — and go live with — a redesign all in the same night and then blaming me for everything that goes wrong with it ...

Mostly it's just every fear of every little and not-so-little thing that could ever go wrong at a newspaper, running with wild abandon across the nonstop, larger-than-life movie screen that is my dreamscape.

And I wake up nauseated. And sometimes it takes a while to realize it was just a dream. And then I actually go to work, where plenty of things go wrong anyway without the help of my jacked-up nightmares.

And then there are the nightmares where I do lose my job, get handed a box, told to pack my stuff and don't come back. And those ones are too real to describe.

All of that to say: Thank goodness it's Friday. Viva la Weekend. May it be free of nightmares.