I’m having dreams where I’m moving, or packing.  Probably 2 or 3 times a week now.

It’s usually college.  It’s the last day of the Spring semester and I haven’t even started to pack up my room, and I can’t find boxes, and I don’t know if I should be storing stuff in the basement or shipping it home.  Everyone is ahead of the game but me.

Sometimes it’s the little house I shared with my friend Brian in Florida.  I’ve graduated, and my parents are driving me and my stuff back to Boston, and again – haven’t packed.

On rare occasions it’s at my grandparents’ house in Montana.  It’s time to go back home, but I can’t find my suitcase, or somehow I’ve stumbled upon a secret room that’s full of my grandfather’s STUFF, and I want ALL OF IT, but I can’t fit everything.

I’ve read enough Jung and online dream interpretation stuff to know that this is pretty much stress-related.  My mind is telling me it’s time to go….where?  Or deep down I’m afraid that I am going to be put in a situation where I have to leave….home?  I don’t know.  It’s just that these are getting tiresome.  I want to go back to the dreams where I’m naked, or I only have a towel, and I have to try and be casual about the fact that I’m naked and need to go through a room full of people in order to find my clothes.

I’m a mess.  I really am.

All of my mental illness bogeys are pretty much kept at bay during my waking hours.  Any urge to do something completely insane runs into this kind of wall that blunts the impulses.  I go through the day with this vague notion that something is roiling under the surface, but it never really manifests itself.

Until I go to sleep.  And then I’m back in my dorm room wondering where I’m going to store that floor-to-ceiling Bauhaus poster.

I just read a piece about “imposter syndrome.”  I’m feeling it.  I wonder if part of all this overnight dream-agita is because I’m waist-deep in data and system tables and I’m not quite sure how I got here.  How did I become this database idiot savant?  I was going to be….famous.  Or something.  Here’s a story:

We had a “career center” in high school.  Many of my high school friends don’t believe me when I mention it.  It existed.  It was a grim little wood-paneled room near the principal’s office.  There were brochures and pamphlets.  There was also a Scantron machine.  You took your #2 pencil, and filled in bubbles for questions about your preferences and predilections, and you would get career recommendations, noisily spit out by an Okidata dot matrix printer.

I probably took that damn test a dozen times.  Always it would recommend anything BUT “famous actress.”  Always it would add a little post-script which read: “You show a strong preference for data.”

I tried to avoid it.  I did.  I got a Bachelor’s in Theatre and a Master’s in Creative Writing and I became a database manager.  I couldn’t avoid this calling, no matter how hard I tried.  I’ve been mucking around in databases now for 20 years.  And I get a kind of perverse joy in so doing.  I’ll admit it.

But let’s get back to the dreams.  Either something really GOOD is going to happen, or it’s all going to shit.  And I need to be prepared either way.  Find me some boxes.