Do You Have Weird Job Dreams? | brokeGIRLrich
It’s been a while since I shared insights about stage management, so today, let’s step away from personal finance and delve into the rather bizarre job-related dreams that sometimes occur during busy shows.
I recently wrapped up a high-stress festival where I operated on minimal sleep for the whole week. Now, as I recuperate, I can’t shake off the work-related dreams that keep surfacing.
Every time I drift off, it feels like I’m back in the booth, orchestrating cues to guide talent backstage and in holding areas. With thousands of people to coordinate each night, it was a quite intricate operation.
During the actual event, the intense days were manageable. Rehearsals began around 8 AM and wrapped up around 9:30/10 PM. After returning home, I’d spend a few hours drafting the next day’s schedule, only to be back onsite by 7 AM. I was running on a mere 4-6 hours of sleep each night.
While the job was ultimately enjoyable, the lack of rest was definitely tough.
For the entirety of this week at home, my dreams have felt astonishingly vivid. I wake up feeling like I haven’t slept at all, as my mind has been tirelessly organizing crowds and issuing commands throughout the night.
Perhaps it’s some sort of post-event stress.
I vividly recall one of my first intense work dreams from college: we were doing a late-night lighting call and ran out of green gels, leaving me with the ridiculous task of using toothpaste on the lights instead.
At least that dream was amusingly absurd.
These recent dreams, however, seem like my brain is simply reliving work. The only other time I experienced anything quite like this was during the tour of Fame about seven years ago.
For the first two weeks of that tour, I would fall asleep each night and dream of calling the show until I woke up, which was incredibly frustrating. It felt like there was no escaping the job even in my downtime.
I suspect there’s a link between these vivid dreams and jobs that don’t allow for sufficient sleep; after all, that Fame tour had an exhausting schedule, often finishing around 1-2 AM and starting the next day’s load-in at 8 AM.
It never feels like a victory for my mental health when my thoughts are in overdrive, but I have yet to figure out how to calm them aside from deep sighing and knowing it will eventually pass. Until then, I’ll keep attempting to manage a surreal cast of thousands as I dream of a show that ended over a week ago—one I’ll never have to call again.
Sigh.
