Another crazy dream rooted in my distant past

Dreams are crazy things and I have them almost nightly. I look forward to them and enjoy them when they are happening. I don't usually have scary dreams but I do often have dreams that are very frustrating and according to the professional head shrinks out there, my dreams are frustrating because I experience frustration in my own life.

I'll get into that explanation and how it could be true towards the end of this writeup, but for now I want to talk about what was in the dream while it is still fresh on my mind because I just woke up.

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So in this dream I was me at around the age I am now, which is normal although sometimes I am me at a considerably younger age. I was at a ski resort, but wasn't skiing although I actually spent quite a lot of time at this resort because I worked at one as a teenager.

Upon concluding my sledding or whatever the hell I was doing in the snow, I went up to the counter to pay and discovered a nearly non-existent line. I patiently wait my turn to pay only to get to the front of the line and be told "oh you can't pay for that here, you have to pay at Garden Terrace." Now I don't expect any of you to know what that is but it is a rather fancy restaurant that exists at a ski resort in Virginia. The thing about Garden Terrace is that it is a very long ways away from where the rest of the resort is at this particular very real in real life resort.

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It's been so long, around 30 years or so, since I have even been to this resort and the restaurant so I had to look it up online and found out that they changed the name of it to Terrace Cafe since the days that I worked there and unfortunately it looks like the cheapened it to accommodate for lower budget punters. Not to be offensive, but now it just looks like a Dairy Queen in Colorado, whereas before it was something super fancy with Michelin-rated chefs. Now they sell burgers and ice cream and what not. What a downgrade!

Well this was important in my dream because of the fact that I am well aware of the fact that if you were to walk to this place from the ski reception area in real life, it would take you probably the better part of an hour to get there. In my dream I was being accompanied by the staff member who told me that I had to pay there and during our walk I was trying to reason with her saying that "it would save everyone more time if you would just let me pay you for this, you are going to be away from your counter for hours because of this."

I wasn't uncomfortable because of the cold because that doesn't happen to me in dreams, I was just annoyed. I wasn't annoyed about the fact that I had to be outdoors because it was lovely in my dream, I was annoyed because this was a horribly inefficient use of staff. In the dream I was actually pleased to be returning to a place that I had worked at so long ago but didn't understand how a place can stay in business when they will take a staff member away from a counter for over an hour just to assist one customer make their way to a truly stupid place to have to pay for your day of sledding (which, by the way, is not something that this resort ever offered.)

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Quick side quest on Wintergreen resort. This was a great place to work as a teenager and I made a lot of money in tips there, much more than your average 16 year old would hope to make in the early 90's but the resort, as ski resorts go, was and is tiny. They are also plagued with lack of snow because Virginia isn't exactly an arctic place and they would frequently have very little snow on the mountain and sometimes they didn't have any at all in the dead of winter. One of the perks of working there was that I got to ski for free and because of this I got to be VERY good at skiing as a young, relatively poor lad.

back to psychology of the dream: I got so frustrated with this staff member who insisted on company policy that the dream actually woke me up. They say you can't die in a dream but in my case I think I am not allowed to kill people in a dream because that's about the point I was at with this woman who insisted that "rules are rules" and now I have to walk an hour to hand over a few dollars at a distant counter rather than the one that is right in front of me at that moment.

According to the professionals, people that dream of frustrating situations have some sort of unresolved frustrating situation(s) in their real awake life. While I feel that most of these diagnoses of dreams are hokum, they aren't wrong when it come to me. I do feel as though this sort of thing is the "astrology of the psychological world" though because it is so vague that it could apply to almost anyone. Who doesn't have at least some frustration in their lives?

My real life is frustrating to some degree because of culture and language differences. I am perpetually frustrated with how things are run here in Vietnam because as you might expect, they do things their way and are not concerned with what anyone who is not Vietnamese thinks about it - not that I am vocal about it or anything. Just yesterday for example, I was cycling and the amount of nearly getting hit by other motorists is something that will always annoy me. There is plenty of space on most of the roads that I ride on, yet people seem to enjoy coming to within inches of you on the side of the road and people will park right in front of you or head towards you driving on the wrong side of the road. later on in the same day I was at the butcher and noticed a big stack of wine bottles and there was a bunch of Pinot Noir bottles and this particular type of wine is quite difficult to acquire here. I picked one up and brought it to the counter with my steaks only to be told, oh, the wine in the cooler is not for sale.... Ok, then what the hell is it doing in there? There must have been 200 bottles of wine in the cooler.

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I don't take my frustration out on staff members ever and part of this is probably because I worked in retail and food-service for most of my life and there is nothing more annoying than some Karen who is berating a staff member who most of the time has ZERO control over how the place is run. I took it is stride, put the bottle back, and went along with my day. Karma clapped back for me though because later on in the same hour I stopped by a friend's bar only to discover Pinot Noir in his fridge at his bar. I asked him if he could order me a few bottles the next time he placed an order and he said yes. See! being cool to other people can reap rewards. Getting angry and blowing your top rarely accomplishes anything.

Dreams fascinate me though, because I had put these two things out of my mind entirely by the time I went to bed but there must have been some remnants of it up in the noggin' while I was asleep because that was the overall theme of my dream. How a winter wonderland got in there is anyone's guess. I am sure the psychologists have some sort of bullshit explanation for why that is in there but I would call BS on that. I haven't so much as seen snow in nearly 15 years.

How are your dreams going? Let's talk about it!