Dream Analysis: I spend a night in corporate hell

I don't have traditional nightmares about bogymen and zombies or stuff like that. Instead I have nightmares about things that are far more real to my actual life and things that I have experienced. While the dream I had last night was all over the place as far as the theme is concerned it mostly related to a particular job that I had in the past where everything we did and were forced to do was so filled with red tape and paperwork that things took 10x as long as they should do or would do in a real company. This was a job with the government, so of course they are not at all concerned with saving time or money and do things in the most incompetent way imaginable. That was the real-life story anyway, the dream was a bit more convoluted than that and involved characters that I actually know and can remember from my own life.

Let's get into it shall we?

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The dream wasn't too far off from my actual workplace in that it was what I always called "cubicle-land" and while I understand why they do this, it is just a horrible way to have to go to work. I think that this sort of work environment leads to drops in mental health and if you work in a place like this, I truly feel sorry for you.

My job IRL involved 90% travel so I was rarely in my actual office cubicle, but when I was there during certain times of year it looked like this: So many people crammed into a small space doing work that once you are no longer a part of it, just seems exceptionally pointless and chockablock with redundancies.

If you've seen the movie "Office Space" you are probably familiar with the TPS reports and we had something very similar to this in the form of time sheets (a recording of how much someone worked to process their paycheck.) These time sheets were exceptionally complicated to the point where as a project manager (my job) we basically had to fill out everyone's time sheets for them because if they made the TINIEST mistake it would get pushed back to the bean counters in payroll. This sheet really didn't need to be as complicated as it was and I sincerely hope that they changed it. They had the person's name on it for immediate recognition locally, but since there are some overlaps in names such as it is completely plausible that there would be multiple Tom Smiths working for the "company" so your employee ID was the most important thing on the sheet. However, some jackaloon decided that this wasn't secure enough so each employee had a revolving employee ID. Basically their ID would change. In order to avoid having repeat ID's, they introduced upper and lowercase letters as well as 0-9 as digits.

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_{we didn't have phones with cameras and I signed a NDA anyway, so the above is just someone's chicken scratch handwriting, imagine attempting to decipher that?}

While this is all fine and dandy on a keyboard, depending on someone's handwriting to be legible enough to determine if they were writing a 6 or a lowercase b was very difficult. Also, since this was meant to be a secret, I had no way, despite being the on-site project manager, of verifying their information. The server that I would electronically plug the data into would accept ANYTHING you put in there and you wouldn't find out that it was wrong until the person in question didn't get paid. There was also the very real opportunity that I was going to enter it incorrectly.

All in all this process took far more time that it should take and there were many instances of people not getting paid.

In the dream it was even worse. Because I now can read Thai some of the employee ID's now had Thai characters in their ID's a well. Now I CAN read Thai, but I have no idea where the characters are on a keyboard.

Also in the dream I had someone approach me about how I hadn't yet submitted some sort of common financial report that served no purpose that existed in my real job. Basically it was a TPS report, and in the dream I was severely back-logged on this pointless document so I started stressing out about how I was even going to be able to make that report because in the dream, it was in relation to a project that concluded months earlier.

Also, the person in the dream that came to me was my subordinate but was acting on the behalf of my superior and the way in which the person under me was talking down to me was really annoying. This is something that was very common in the real life job that I had. The higher ups seemed to take great joy in mistreating those below them and rather than call you and tell you yourself it was very common for them to use a devious tactic of sending someone below you to tell you what you have to do. This was their way of reminding you that you are their bitch and you have to do anything they say.

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In real life the work environment in that building that thankfully I was in only 10% of the year was about as toxic as you can imagine. The people who didn't buy into the hierarchy like myself were a rarity unfortunately and there was also this sort of animosity on the part of the higher ups towards those of us that were 90% on the road working because despite being their underlings, we made more money than they did. So they felt like they were extra-entitled to belittle us. This was true in the dream as well when my boss came to me and very publicly berated me for being late with many submissions. In the dream I played it like I did in real life: There is and was no point in arguing, I just sat there and took it and had already planned that once I was back on the road I would stop working on whatever nonsense she was talking about. haha. This is something I regularly did when I had the job in real life because I knew that THEY KNEW the paperwork they were asking me to do was pointless, and this is why once I was back out on the road and hadn't submitted what they asked me to submit that it was simply forgotten.

The boss in the dream was an actual boss that I had in life but it was from a Pizza Hut that I worked at when I was 17. I don't know how Monica ended up in my psyche as being a tyrannical overlord because she was actually a really nice lady.

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_{This is not Monica, unfortunately I couldn't find any pictures of her but she was a great boss and a great person. I'm a bit upset that she was thrust into an evil role in my dream}

Also, in the dream I was in a makeshift and rather terrible house and this was also true when I had that 90% travel job. Because I was almost always on the road, the apartment that I maintained in the city where the office was, was intentionally not good. I had a roommate but my bedroom was basically the only part of the house that was "mine". I recall just having a desk and a mattress on the floor and my roommate in real life must have loved this deal. I paid half the rent for years but I was almost never there. I remember really hating that house and the roommate, who I barely even knew because I was almost never there. I haven't thought about that in a while but in the dream the house and the room, was an absolute wreck.

When I finally work up I was still in a haze of bits trying to figure out where I actually was in time and space. As crazy as this sounds it took me a minute and even needed to look around a bit to understand that I was in my rather comfortable condo in Da Nang, Vietnam. What a relief that I didn't need to do those timesheets or the other senseless reports that my boss, Monica, demanded of me via an underling!

It was a real joy to wake up from that dream and again, if any of you actually work in an environment like this I feel terribly sorry for you and hope you can find a way out. It is soul-crushing to work like that.

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So what do the experts have to say about dreaming about stuff like this?

If you dream about an office psychologists say this:

If you see an office in your dream, it means that you are overwhelmed with work.

You might have set some goals that are too ambitious and that you need a lot more time for than you have thought.

Also, if you have problems at home, you are probably looking for comfort at work to escape a situation that is too complicated.

Once again this seems a little too "one size fits all" to really be true and why I think dream interpretation is on par with Astrology as far as being factual is concerned.

I am awake now and really happy that I no longer have to do something like that for real. It was a nightmare. One that I lived for around 7 years before I got out of it!