Dreams of Christmases Past

We've reached that point in the run up to Christmas when the BBC's daytime schedules sees the usual cavalcade of soaps,quiz shows and lifestyle programmes give way to kids' films and comedy repeats of previous years' seasonal specials.  When I was working full time, this became a magical time of year as I glimpsed this promised land of out-of-the-ordinary programming if I was able to get home for lunch.  One year, when I was recovering from a cold, I remember being so tired that I started to fall asleep on the sofa as I indulged in the nostalgia of an ancient Christmas episode of Only Fools and Horses.  I always thought that, once I was free of work and, most specifically, that last lousy job from Hell, I'd be able to spend the week before Christmas crashed out on the sofa, enjoying the warm embrace of daytime TV Christmas.  Of course, it hasn't worked out that way, as this week I find myself once again recovering from a cold and consequently feeling exhausted.  So tired, in fact, that I seem to have spent most of the day dozing off on the sofa, or back on my bed.  Which is ironic as, if I were still working at that job, this was the week when I'd feel that I was slogging, exhausted, toward the finishing line represented by the 23 or 24 of December, when I'd finish for the year, praying that nothing 'urgent' came up that would entail me spending my evenings standing on some angry psychopath's doorstep trying to serve them with some legal document.  Even then, I'd usually have to be 'on call' for the days between Christmas and New Year in order to get the time off, meaning that I could never really enjoy those days properly.

I was put in mind of all this as, during one of my dozes today, I actually had a couple of dreams related to that job.  As my dreams always are these days, they were very vivid and somewhat bizarre.  The one I remember best involved my old manager assisting me at a repossession and succeeding in wrecking the building by bringing down several huge heaps of hoarded stuff that filled the property down.  Which is how I knew it was a dream: that particular manager had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the field to assist anybody.  (He eventually succeeded in suing the department for a work related injury - not incurred in the field, but when he tripped over a carelessly placed mail bag in the office, later retiring on health grounds).  Anyway, the dream took another strange turn when one of the contractors who was meant to be securing the property started urging the owner to sue us for damages, which got him into trouble with his manager which, in turn, resulted in me, as a union rep, taking his side.  People then started taking sides in an industrial dispute,  I woke up before we got to picket lines and demos.  All through the dream, I sort of knew it was a dream as I was well aware that I no longer worked in that job and kept trying to tell people that, to no avail.  Which is in contrast to many of my other recent dreams, where I seem to be having ever more complicated conversations and discussions with people in them.  Or rather, with myself, of course, as they all take place in my head.  At least one of my dreams seems to have been prophetic, though.  A few years ago I dreamed that a friend was running a bookshop - it was so vivid that I texted her to ask if she had bought a bookshop.  Not surprisingly, she hadn't.  But, just the other day, in passing, she mentioned in a text that she and her sister had recently opened a bookshop - I'm still trying to get her to elaborate on this, to find out if it is like the one she was running in the dream.  Spooky stuff, eh?