"Your slumbering teems with such horrible dreams!"

“When you're lying awake
With a dismal headache
And repose is taboo'd by anxiety
I conceive you may use

Any language you choose

To indulge in, without impropriety…

Well, you get some repose
In the form of a doze
With hot eyeballs and head ever aching
But your slumbering teems
With such horrible dreams
                                                                     That you'd very much better be waking” -- from Iolanthe by W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan

Why do I keep reliving trauma through nightmares? Here I am again at my old firm, as a sales assistant, or at least acting as one. I’m working for my old money managers' team. There is an African stock with a tremendously complicated reorganization plan, but the development team is too overworked on other projects to design a program for it. It has to be worked out manually, on paper. Kerri is the only sales assistant who knows how to do this because she had to do it for her money managers. It involves not only the shares held in the African stock, but the calculation must take into account other stock positions held in each individual client account. Everyone is overworked and no one has extra time. I suggest hiring accounting temps but am told by HR that there are none available because every other firm is in the same boat we are – too much work, too few skilled workers. I make a comment saying that the same is true for farm workers and that is why the crops are rotting in the fields unharvested, and that we should let in the migrant workers on the southern border. One of the senior money managers responds, seemingly “from above,” like a deity, that we should just let the crops rot because who cares about the next generation, anyway. I hear that there is a cash option for the reorg that would be simpler, but less profitable for the clients. I suggest it to one of the managers, but then rescind my suggestion, conceding that we must do what is in the best interests of the clients, and since I'm a compliance officer I must uphold the highest fiduciary principles.

Long retired and dead (dead in real life but fully alive in the dream) Mary is back, working for Neil, and bitchy as ever. It seems there is no one able to help me, though Kerri can spare a little time explaining the procedure to me. No temps, no other sales assistants can help because they are all overwhelmed with their own work. Somehow, I’m still in the compliance department too, and though I’m tempted to quit and just walk away, I know the firm needs me (am I so irreplaceable?). I start to have a meltdown in front of Neil. Instead of comforting me he insists that I do the work. I have suicidal thoughts (in the dream) and even open a patio door (the terrace is tiny compared to the one at our old office location) and it is raining outside. Some of the traders do the same and people worry that they might really jump. One of the traders starts to have a meltdown and needs her husband (also a trader at the firm) right away. I send a male coworker, Walter, into the gym to get him because he is taking a shower after a workout. The female trader says there is an air vent high on the wall that goes directly from the trading room into the shower area, and I lift her up so she can try to speak to her husband. She can’t hear him, probably because the water is running. Walter gets to the husband, but is told he needs 15 more minutes. I comment, “just rinse yourself off – your wife needs you!” but then am told he has some kind of physical condition that prevents him from moving too fast.

I am torn between protecting myself and my mental health, and my duty/responsibility/obligation to the firm. It seems that I am retired or formerly retired and remember (in the dream) that I volunteered to help out in the compliance department after my retirement because they needed me, though I was not initially paid. (This is a recurring theme in many other dreams.)

Then suddenly, I awaken, and like the Lord Chancellor in the Gilbert & Sullivan opera, am relieved to realize that it was only a terrible nightmare. I am still retired!

"But the darkness has passed
And it's daylight at last
And the night has been long
Ditto, ditto my song
And thank goodness they're both of them over!"