Canine Dreams

A few nights ago I had a very vivid dream. My family lived in an apartment building a couple of floors up. Didn’t have an elevator, so I had to take the stairs.

Anyway, I was a worker bee and they all stayed at home. A 1940s worker bee, with the hat and the overcoat and the galoshes. I came home one cold and rainy night and discovered the girls had bought a puppy!

All well and good. We played with the puppy a bit, when suddenly – in that way dreams have – I was trudging up those stairs again. Opened the door and guess what! They bought another dog, an older one, rescued from a shelter.

Then, just like Groundhog Day, I walked up those stairs again and again, and more dogs! One that looked like a cocker spaniel, one that looked like a golden retriever. One was a fat little bull-doggish-looking thing.

Five dogs! My girls (wife included) had got five dogs to live with us as a family, in our apartment.

I freaked out. “I’m going to be the one walking them!” was my plaintive yet voluminous cry. “Me! Not you! Me!”

At the time, it was a very emotional, highly charged outburst that reverberated with much passion through my dream-mind. Though now, a few days removed from the episode, it seems petty and miniscule, a drop of rain compared to the fury of a category-5 hurricane. Also, it’s kinda funny now, whereas when I awoke I was bathed in a cold sweat. (Gotta aim those air conditioner vents at the other side of the bedroom.)

Driving to work that morning, I realized: the dogs are symbolic of tasks at work. My company just bought another, smaller company a month ago, one that we are energetically growing. As a result, people like me – people doing the background work, the accounting end of things – are getting swamped and tsunamied. Battered and brained. And it’s taking its toll on all of us in various ways. This past week for me, for reasons I can’t go into on an anonymous blog, was particularly hellish.

Now, it’s not that I don’t want more work at work. I do; work at work generally makes the time go by faster. It’s the whole disorganized, figger it out as you go, fake-it-until-you-make-it, we-will-find-a-way-or-make-one style – a style chosen out of necessity – that is genuinely grating on the soul. Sure, I can take not know what I’m doing for a few days, but as a few weeks draw out into a month, month-and-a-half, it takes a toll. I desperately need systems in place so I can do my job efficiently.

Plus, I’m hoping to parlay all this into a nice big well-deserved raise when I’m up for review in two months. So I guess this system-creation is where it’ll all hinge come that cold, crisp early-November day. We’ll see.

As of now, though, every time I see a dog I can’t help thinking about my cubicle at work, and the stacks and stacks of paperwork within it.