The Nightmare After Halloween

Last night, I woke up with my heart pounding, drenched in cold sweat.

It had happened again.

I have these reoccurring nightmares that I retrospectively fail out of school.  Insane, I know! I never remember being so caught up in the fear of failure while enrolled at State, in fact I really enjoyed the rush I got before a big project being due, so you can imagine how bothersome it is to lose sleep over the fear of flunking ten months post graduation.  

Here is the kicker; I am always nightmaring over topics I never took in college. Spanish! Oatmeal marketing! Wood class!

What?!

In my dream, it is always oversleeping, drunkenness, or a very well dressed, nicely scented boy who seems to be the sinister culprit of my not completing whatever bizarro dream world examination thrown at me. Ah, irony.

Dream World, f* you too.

When I was lying in bed, mentally talking myself down (H, come on, you live in Chicago, they already sent you your little multi-thousand dollar piece of paper in the mail) I started mulling over the whole concept of stress, the evolutionary benefits of it, the complete and utter nonsense of succumbing to it in my pretty little rosy world (Yes, I do this half asleep, I also dream about giving Scandinavian audiences a presentation on the best way to brew coffee, get over it).

Humans are the only animals that create stress due to over thinking. Yes, I get it, we are also the only creatures to create meals that carry 26x the amount of fat we need in any given day, so rationality be damned in the evolutionary process.  Not the point, the point is I am losing sleep due to stress about an event that has already been concluded, really successful I might add!!

Click, click, click… I started listing the true reasons I was stressing out even once I fell asleep, which is naturally when shit got real.  It took another hour and a half of tossing and turning, and an egg with some super yummy hazelnut coffee (Yes Folgers, you are the best part of waking up) and a really, really long bus ride into Greektown this morning to fully wrap my head around my dream world’s reaction of my life.  

I am just fine. Yes, I said it. I don’t have a drinking a problem, I am decently healthy, I enjoy the people I have the pleasure of surrounding myself with, and I actually know precisely were I’d like to see myself in ten years.

I’m sure as hell not letting go of anything or chilling out about much, but Dream World, you willy wonder spirit you, thanks for shedding light on the obscene ridiculousness of stressing out about things that I either can or cannot control, and have the ability to see through.  

C just brought me blueberry coffee. Back to the lab!

-H