I have very intense, vivid dreams; day-glow Technicolor, long, complicated and often frightening dreams.
My dreams are so involved that traditionally my family actually limits the time I can use to tell them about "the crazy dream" I had last night. Consider yourself warned.
Last night I dreamt that I was fighting in the Zombie Apocalypse.
What is the Zombie Apocalypse, you might ask? Hell if I know, so you can imagine my surprise to find myself in the midst of one. I don't watch those movies or read those books or play those video games-- although I did have a rather psychologically-fascinating match.com date with a libertarian paleo-eating zombie aficionado who I like to refer to as "Plan Z"... but I digress.
So it's like this: The sky is a brutal burnt orange, I'm at the coast and the water is a churning, roiling grey. I look up to see a huge cruise ship looming over me and I decide I'd be safer inside it, so I scurry onboard. Everywhere around me people are carrying guns and screaming that the zombies are coming and I look down to find a stick in my hands. Yep, I'm going to fight zombies with a stick. No one can call me an early adopter of technology, even in my dreams.
So I'm running down passages in this ship and they're hot and claustrophobic and I keep turning blind corners while screaming like a maniac and swinging my stick wildly...and finally I find myself in the engine room. I'm not sure I'd know an engine room even if I found myself in one during an actual zombie apocalypse, so let's suffice it to say there was a lot of vaguely menacing machinery in this room and it looked engine-y. And now in addition to a stick, I've got a piece of paper in my hands that looks suspiciously like an excel spreadsheet and I realize my boss is expecting me to provide her with a sales forecast for my marketing programs. Like right now. No, not later. Now.
I'm crouched behind something and I'm trying to do some ROI calculations in my head using made-up numbers (and I'm a mathtard, even in my dreams), every now and again popping up and brandishing my stick to ward off any unwitting zombies who might be headed my way. And I'm thinking, "Forecasting? WTF? I'm fighting zombies here!"
And that, in a nutshell, is my life in corporate America. I apparently don't get enough of it in a literal sense during my forty(ish, admittedly) hour work week, so I turn it into something figurative in my dreams just to soak a little more enjoyment out of it. As Depeche Mode may have said at some point in the 80s, I just can't get enough.
Let's work it out, shall we?
Cruise ship = Large corporation
Stick = Insufficient tools I've been provided to do my job
Zombie Killing = My job
Forecasting = Superfluous, time-consuming busy work that keeps me from killing zombies
Engine room = My stifling little cubicle
By the by, I like zombie-fighting better than marketing. Think it comes with dental?
