I Keep Having the Same Annoying Dreams

I am 13 weeks pregnant. Over the past few weeks, I've been super tired. I've barely wanted to do anything. The sites I work for have been dipping when it comes to earnings and traffic, so that is partly to blame for the demotivation I've been feeling. (Why bother putting in effort for a few cents?)

I've always had vivid dreams. While pregnant, my dreams have been more in-depth. I think the deeper dreaming comes from sleeping more. I have enough time to get into the clutches of REM sleep.

Earlier this year, I wrote several stories about dreams I had. During that time, I would wake up, write down my dreams first thing in the morning, and then move on with my day. I ended up ditching the project because it didn't really garner much interest.

To be honest, most of my writing attempts this year have led to dead ends. I keep putting down words, but I'm basically running on a treadmill over here and not getting anywhere.

I'm desperately trying to earn passive income so I don't have to go back to a full-time job. It really hasn't been easy to earn from Medium, HubPages, Vocal.Media, and the likes. I wonder how much the Google helpful content update impacted those sites. . .

Pregnancy Dreams

I have noticed some trends in my pregnancy dreams, and that's really why I felt the urge to write a story/article/journal entry.

I keep having workplace and school dreams. This is frustrating because I haven't been in a class in almost a decade. My last full-time job was two years ago! I admittedly worry all the time that I failed when it came to having a career. I was a journalist for six years, and the lows of that career speak much louder to me than the highs. I earned my master's degree, but I feel like it's mostly been left in the dark.

I'm not sure when I'll pursue a career again. At the moment, I'm preparing for motherhood. I partly want passive income, so I can focus on my future mother-child bond. At this time, I don't want to divide my time between family and work. I mean that honestly, but there is another side to me that feels as though I destroyed my dreams, I left my dreams dormant, I could amount to more, I'm wasting my talents, and so on and so forth.

I think the shadow part of myself that's trying to lure me back to a life of earning big money and making things happen. . . I think that part of myself is toxic. This part of myself is ignoring all the challenges of the working world. It's idealizing something that's actually meant to be secondary: Your career is meant to support you, not be you.

Anyway, I can tell at night when I'm sleeping that these things really bother me. I can't go back and change my past, but in my dreams, that is what I'm trying to do. I go back to high school to try and perfect an audition. I was in choir, and I think that competitive world of trying out for solos and top-of-the-pyramid groups really got to my head as an impressionable teenager. Frequently, I have to tell myself high school choir didn't matter.

My high school choir reputation literally doesn't matter. It has no bearing on my life. I mean, no one who is reading this cares, right?

But there is still someone inside my head who wants to sing. This person wants to be on Broadway, she wants to work with Hans Zimmer, she wants to be included in something BIG. This crazy person thinks she can be a star. She can use her voice to bring world peace. This person is unhinged.

I still think about classes and rearranging my schedule. In college, whenever I was doing badly in a class, I would drop it so it wouldn't impact my GPA. (I didn't do that with chemistry though, and I probably should have.) I still think about taking tests and missing classes. Will this ever stop? My master's degree is old enough to go to elementary school and work on multiplication problems.

The workplace dreams are even more annoying. I don't want to be a newscast producer. In my dreams, I have a strong fear that I'm coming to work for the wrong shift, or I won't have enough content for the day. There was one dream where I was working on a story about Dracula. I found his house in a suburban neighborhood. I rang the doorbell and ran away because I realized, heck, it's Dracula! He later tried to lure me up a spiral staircase that led to darkness. He talked to me in a creepy voice:

"Come up here, Andrea! I have something to show you. . ."

Then I'm at work trying to write about Dracula moving into town. I'm trying to convince people that Dracula is the lead story. I'm upset that other people don't see the significance of Dracula living in a suburban area.

***

I'm fine with having weird dreams. I would just like the anxiousness of work and school to be out of the picture. I'd like a nice fantasy retreat. Maybe if I play video games all day I'll have dreams about video games.

Here's to hoping my work and school dreams come to an end. There are other fish to fry. If I don't let go of my past, I probably won't write a novel or find new and better opportunities.

I have no interest in working in a newsroom ever again.

***

Could I be distracting myself with the past because deep down I'm terrified of confronting the reality of motherhood?