Kafka dream

Well, I just went a whole week without a post. Whoops. No excuse this time--there were just other things that I elected to spend my time on instead. I guess that's what happens when the most pressing reason to write regularly is "because you ought to."

Last night I had a dream that's become recurrent over the past three months or so. I tend to dream pretty frequently, but it's exceedingly rare that I have the same one multiple times. And as with most recurring dreams, this one is easy to read into.

In the dream, I'm working in a dingy neighborhood in some major Northeastern city. It's not clear whether the city is New York or Philly. The job I'm working is some sort of menial desk job--I typically spend the day correcting someone else's spelling and grammatical errors. The office I work in is cluttered, cramped, and without air conditioning, so I sit sweating through my work shirt while fans ineffectually push the air around.


My shift ends, and I walk outside into the surrounding neighborhood. It's down at the heels, but not threatening--it's more of a ratty commercial district than a ghetto. The people on the street look haggard, and the street food is gross but edible. It's pretty far from the city center, and public transit consists of a series of subway/surface trolleys like the Green Line in Philly. I hop on one of these trolleys to go home.

Only it doesn't work out that way.

Invariably the trolleys are out of service, or I read the map wrong, or they just go in circles. But every time I try to take the trolley home, I find myself back in the same crappy commercial district. Somehow the time never changes--it's always the morning and always time for another work day to start. So I go back to my stuffy office and work another shift. Thanks to the wonders of dream time compression, this can happen over and over again during the same night of dreaming.

The dream isn't really a nightmare. I don't wake up in a cold sweat. But it's definitely not a comfortable experience either. I'm not sure exactly why I'd have a Kafka dream about a job that I don't have, though I have had jobs that involved similarly menial editorial work. Perhaps I'm worried that I'll have to put in overly long hours at any job that isn't my current one (not likely). Perhaps this is just what my subconscious mind makes of adult life--you spend most of your time either at work or commuting. Or perhaps I'm critiquing all the obnoxious public-transit experiences I've had over the last five years.

Whatever the reason, I would like to stop spending my sleep hours doing crappy work I don't enjoy. There's plenty of time for that when I'm awake.