Last night’s dream was a little different to my usual anxiety dream.
Usually in this dream, I’m hunting for a toilet and I’m bursting to go.
I’m running up and down corridors of a building hunting for the ladies’ room. Up and down staircases getting more and more lost.
Each room I come to has moulded floors, think similar to a very shallow version of a large hot tub. Lots of areas where pools can form and nye on impossible to keep clean.
Some cubicles are showers or changing rooms, some have no dividers between each pan. But the worst bit is the floors. The toilets are mostly blocked and overflowing. The floors are swimming with water and soggy toilet roll and goodness knows what else, and my feet are bare.
The last thing I want to do is step into this rancid water. It can go on for what feels like hours.
But last nights dream was completely different.
I was at work still, but it was a different office and team.
I had to keep moving my car around to different car parks so it would be seen, and it was raining.
When I was at my desk I kept getting calls from my friend who was suffering from panic attacks and I was having to talk them down. Whispering the calls so I wouldn’t get caught.
I knew the bosses and the staff were monitoring my productivity and I had a mountain of work to get done.
I also had a stack of laundry I had to get out the office. My childrens clothes were the clothes they wore when they were little. The pile kept toppling over and I kept losing things.
I kept getting asked to make coffee and tea rounds The kitchen was packed, and I couldnt remember the orders or get out of the door with a large tray of coffee cups without then knocking and spilling over.
And then in the middle of all of this, I suddenly became desperate for the loo.
I tried a few different restrooms. They were all filthy and overflowing but this time the floors were flat.
I then entered another of the rooms and found a group of my friends in there. They were dressed in eveningwear.
They are the friends that I would refer to as free thinkers. They have a confidence that will not have dulled by others’ opinions. A lot run their own business and the rest are people who appear to really have their lives together on social media.
Now don’t get me wrong. I know social media can be a cesspit. I know it’s a rose-tinted view of lives that hide the not-so-shiny realities. But these people were carefree, are happy and had no thoughts of the consequences of the water fights they’d been having with clods of wet loo roll. Th
eir laughter and free-spirited nature left me envious and reminiscent of who I once used to be.
When they left, the whole room was awash. The floors were back to my usual feared state of wet paper swimming on the surface, clogging between my bare toes.
But this time I found a squeegee. I started to clean the floors of the whole room, scared the others would get in trouble. Knowing that if I was caught I myself would be in trouble too.
For the first time ever I took control of the situation to make the room usable. So I could finally relieve myself.
The anxieties this time were not about the toilet, it was about everything else.
And you’ll be very glad to know that when I finally did get to go, I didn’t wake up in a puddle of my own.