Like all court reporters, I have dreams where I'm in court or at a deposition and I don't have my stenography machine; I'm trying to write -- longhand because I don't know pen shorthand -- on legal pads, envelopes, toilet paper, the table, the palm of my hand, etc.

If the dream continues, I'll run out of paper/table/space or ink and start just listening to the testimony very carefully, hoping I can remember it all later.

adm

I was a travel agent from 1974 til 1995. I STILL have dreams about working out incredibly ornate itineraries and air ticket fares. Complicated air fares - like Round-the-World fares.

I suppose I'll always have these dreams...

When I worked retail, I'd have nightmares during which I'd fold and fold and fold. I, somehow, would prevent myself from falling into a deep sleep until my job was done. Unfortunately, the folding never ended (and I never did get paid).

Yes, I have odd dreams related to my profession, mine are a lot easier to explain to people then yours are though.

For another dream, go here: http://snipurl.com/9t71b

thank you so much hilzoy, it's a hilarious dream, but i was up till i read this completely unschooled with respect to distinctions between propositions.

it's stuff like this that keeps political animal on my short list of things to read.

I'm a scientist/university professor, and all my work-related dreams seem to involve conferences. Once I dreamt that I had 30 minutes to prepare an hour-long talk and travel to the other side of the country to present it. I lost my luggage and missed a connecting flight en route. Another time I dreamt that I was attending a conference presentation and fell asleep in the hall---yes, I dreamed that I was sleeping.

The more relevant question here is:

If you dream about work, should you be paid for overtime?

Very odd dreams indeed, but as my particular profession dictates confidentiality, I cannot disclose any of them.

I was a high school teacher, then a lawyer. Now I'm retired. I still occasionally have dreams where I am in front of a class without a lesson plan, once in a while taking a final exam and leave the room but can't get back. But I never had a lawyer dream--in front of a panel of judges with nothing to say, for example. Needless to say, nothing ever as intricate as yours.

For really frightening dreams, there is a technique that can be learned to turn the dream into something less frightening, or you can learn to wake yourself up before it gets too bad. You can program yourself before you go to sleep to do these things if you are having a run of bad dreams.

I doubt it would work for PTSD, but it can work in ordinary circumstances.

jm, @ 13:00,

Not only for overtime but for work-related hazard, as well.

You know what's even cooler about this dream? It's that dreams themselves - the really wild ones, anyway, are for their internal logic so reliant on synthetic a priori propositions! And I can give you an excellent example. I once had a dream where after several dramatic plot turns I ended up at a full-service station with a really greasy, dirty attendant. I'm inside waiting in line, when suddenly, everyone hears this noise from out by the pumps, so we go and look out, and here's that greasy, dirty attendant just laid out flat on the concrete, and right next to his head is a full-grown German shepherd. And here I'll explain this the way I always have with this dream - it was in that dream way that you just know, and everyone in the dream looking at this scene immediately understands that this station attendant has just thrown up this full-grown, whole, unmasticated or otherwise gory, German shepherd. And everyone standing in line just looked at each other and said, "Man, can you believe he actually ate that thing?" And then I woke up, laughing.

I'm rather fond of the synthetic a priori proposition and wonder if in many cases "synthetic" is a misnomer. There are a lot of things we can "know" through our other senses on a subconscious or subliminal level which we cannot prove through our prior experience, but which in fact turn out to be true and can be explained through an "intuition" gleaned from these subconscious observations.

A few years ago I had a case that required driving 40 miles every day to Orange County for a trial. Really dull case: all about job trainees, whose names, dates of training, etc., were all spelled out in page after page of spreadsheets.

I was short of sleep through most of the trial and one day decided, while driving home, to pull off the highway to find somewhere to sleep. I found a large shopping mall with ample parking spaces, pulled into one and fell asleep.

I don't remember how long I slept but I do recall that, when I woke up, finding myself between two parallel lines in a sea of parallel lines, it took me a few seconds to remember that I was a human being, not just a name or a number on some cosmic spreadsheet. Not sure that this meets your standard for dreams, but it was unsettling.

Aside grom the run-of-the-mill getting-it-on-somewher-in-the-office-building-with-hot-coworkers kinda dreams (or are they memories? mee-yowww) I don't dream about my current profession. But I've had some typically-awful retail sales jobs, selling electronics & appliances, cell phones & beepers (remember those? cue snarky comment by Michael Ian Black!). I occasionally have dreams where I; forced to go back to one of those jobs, all the while trying to explain I just dropped in out of curiosity, I don't belong ther, to no avail. Hell, one of the stores was a chain that went belly up - there's a Staples now where my store was. No matter. Grand Re-Opening! And we're not updating stock in my dreams, either, so I try to describe dvd & blu-ray & ipods & hdtv to a group busting out the laserdisc players & cd walkmans that are now ONLY $100 & rear screen projection tvs that are unwatchable if you're more than two feet to the side of dead-center & cell phones that are bigger than a human head. No matter' Gotta clear out the old stuff and don't forget t push consumer protection plans (they are NOT EXTENDED WARRANTIES!!!)

Two nights ago I was dreaming about operating a giant Fourier Transform Spectrograph. Having spent the last week trying to figure out what spectrograph I want to put in the proposal we're writing that perhaps isn't so surprising.

However, it reminds me of when I was writing my dissertation some years back now. To "relax" after working until about midnight in my office, I'd play Doom for half an hour or an hour. I'm sure lots of people have dreamed about playing Doom; almost everyone who plays Tetris for any length of time dreams Tetris dreams.
That wasn't what happened to me however. Walking home after playing late one night, the traffic light turned from green to amber. I ducked, thinking a fireball was coming at me. After that, no more Doom before bed.

There's a story that Winston Churchill once awoke in the middle of the night from a dream in which he had realized the ultimate secret of existence. He knew he had to write it down while it was still in his mind, before the dream faded, and that when he fell back asleep he would forget it. So he grabbed a bit of paper and a pencil, wrote down his profound realization in a few words, and went back to sleep, confident that he had preserved this great insight.

When he awoke in the morning, he had indeed forgotten the original dream, and he eagerly grabbed the sheet of paper, anxious to know the great, deep secret that had come to him in his dreams, and read these words:

"The whole is pervaded with the smell of turpentine."

I do sometimes have dreams about my professional life, but never with heavy philosophical overtones.

When I worked as a translator I used to dream in multiple languages - IN CONTEXT. One recurring dream was of being in Korea during the Japanese occupation. I would dream about speaking Japanese on the street, in Korean when in the homes of Koreans, and in English when speaking to my American friends.

I teach economics at a state university. I have a recurring dream, in which I'm going from my office to a classroom, to give the lecture that pulls all the course material together. And I can't get there. The elevator won't stop at the right floor, the staircases have no exits on the right floor (and, in some versions, the elevator and/ot the stairs transport me to different buildings altogether). I leave one building, and the building I need to get into has no entrance that I can reach. No matter what I do, I cannot get to the classroom.

Wonderful. Dr. Freud would now order you to do your dream-work.

Walking home after playing late one night, the traffic light turned from green to amber. I ducked, thinking a fireball was coming at me.

Took public transportation to a chess tournament in which I was playing. Absent mindedly gently pushed another passenger out of my way, saying, "I adjust."

Well, anxiety dreams about work are most likely to come about when one is feeling anxious about work, so of COURSE I have them. What egomaniacal, half-brain-dead incompetent in ANY position of responsibility WOULDN'T feel anxiety about their work?

Oh ... right ... well, um, never mind, I guess.

The women with whom I am married suspects that you had been studying too much. I, however, think you had just read "The Kuglemass Episode" http://tinyurl.com/9uwf2g

which concludes

"He had been projected into an old textbook, Remedial Spanish, and was running for his life over a barren, rocky terrain as the word tener ("to have")-a large and hairy irregular verb- raced after him on its spindly legs."

In my imperfect recollection, Kuglemass exited pursued by a synthetic a priori proposition across a landscape of abstract ideas.

An attempt at an interpretation, if I may:

Your dream:

I was standing in a hall full of people who were listening to a speaker inveighing against synthetic a priori propositions. The atmosphere owed a lot to speeches by Hitler on the Jews and Joseph McCarthy on Communists: the speaker was standing behind one of those old-style microphones, shouting: We must root out synthetic a priori propositions! We must eliminate them! The crowd was getting increasingly worked up. I was standing by the wall, watching, feeling deeply uneasy.

Suddenly, I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror. I was entirely featureless and flat and rectangular, sort of like a large stick of gray gum. And I realized: oh no, I am a synthetic a priori proposition! In the middle of this crowd of people who want to eliminate me! There was no way out of the hall that I could find, and in any case I didn't want to draw attention to myself, so I just huddled by the wall, terrified, hoping no one would notice that I was one of the very propositions they were so eager to eliminate. Eventually, I woke up in a cold sweat.

I am guessing that, given your job here as a blogger/journalist, the right wingnuts like Rush, with their hyperventilating Joe McCarthy "blame everybody" screeds do terrify you, and that compared to them you can sometimes see yourself as featureless and rather dull, grayish - and that they also DO sound like they want to eliminate you. (We anonymous ones also feel terrified by them, but you are out on the front line and are more vulnerable to be attacked by them.) Yes, the Liberal press, especially the bloggers, are to blame for everything, so you are demonized, like Hitler's Jews and McCarthy's Communists. - hmmm, I never really saw the Commies of Tail Gunner Joe that way, as equal to Hitler's Jews - but it is a nice glimpse...

It sounds obviously like an anxiety dream, but also does tie them in with the Hitler-like scenario they bring with them. In fact, I would suppose that - were we able to know what the hell he was saying in all those newsreels - Hitler would sound a whole LOT like Rush.

As a journalist, you DO try, in general, to just blend in with the woodwork, do you not - just like in the dream? Even when you don't feel threatened, right? But this one emphasizes that aspect of your work. As a journalist, even with a byline, you STILL often want to just lay low - but especially when you are reporting on such reactionaries.

It is no exaggeration that the Rushes of this world DO want to eliminate you, the Liberal blogger. You ARE a threat to them, and they know it - and YOU know they know it. Without Liberal bloggers - and not just in this election cycle - Obama's victory would not, could not, have happened. The groundwork done in the past built the online infrastructure to take the country back from the fascists - and the fascists know it.

As a synthetic a priori proposition in the dream, you represent - if I may suggest - the 'reality-based' world, the world that deals with experience, not just things that are assumed to be true because some authority said so. The religious right and pretty much all right wingnuts look at themselves as "those who know", and people like you just don't get it, with your insistence on paying attention to reality. That is what I rad "synthetic a priori proposition" as meaning: that you check with reality to see if your thinking is correct. BUT THEY DON'T. Hence, their wanting to get you the hell out of their hall.

I also read the hall as the political spectrum. They are questioning just what the hell YOU are doing in THEIR place? You have no business there!

So, your subconscious is just accessing symbolic people and situations from history to illustrate for you your position as a Liberal blogger/journalist, and your conflict with belief-based idiots.

They believe, and YOU? You, you worthless piece of character-less nothing, you keep checking if things agree with reality? What the hell is YOUR problem??? That is what they are yelling at you.

Live with it. It is the profession you are in, take it or leave it.

At the same time, you do KNOW - from your 'synthetic a priori proposition' knowledge - that the Nazis are history. Could your subconscious be telling you - through the little performance that is your dream - that Rush and company, dittoheads all, are also becoming history? Against all their screaming and bile spewing?

That is what I get out of it. At this moment in history it is apparent that their time has passed, yes?

. . . .

FYI: I did dream analysis for a long time, long ago, but this one doesn't take a lot of interpreting; it is pretty plain, isn't it?

I don't recall having as complicated a dream about work as you have, but I do remember an incident that makes me laugh to this day. I am a tax accountant and have a knack for looking at numbers and finding relationships. One night during tax season, I rolled over in bed and woke up and looked at my new (at the time) digital alarm clock and saw a number that freaked me out because I didn't know what the number meant. When I became oriented, I laughed out loud.

While working towards a doctorate in anthropology I took a few geology and geography classes. One night I dreamt I had BECOME the historical Oregon Territory — all of it, every rock, river and tree.

I'm a librarian and have dreams about not being able to find a book every once and awhile.

Sometimes I have dreams about fencing in the library. I know how to fence so it's not completely random, but I always wonder why I'd be doing it in the library.

In graduate school I had dreams about my thesis on knuckle walking and the development of bipedalism in hominines on a regular basis--some were actually helpful. Others were just weird anxiety odysseys.

Schechter Poultry was a 1935 Supreme Court case that crippled the New Deal and sharply limited the scope of federal regulation, and Cravath, Swain & Moore was the prominent NY law firm that represented the pro-business interests. (It was effectively overruled a few years later.)

So Brad was dreaming that he was helping out the bad guys.

Best dream ever I was the source code our team had been putting together. For the first time I saw how 'my' (the code's) parts fit together and communicated with each other, including the small part that I had been working on, as a unified system. I felt peaceful and really aware.

I figure if the mind is engaged upon X enough it keeps thinking about X, conscious or otherwise.

That in a dream you become the X could be looked at as a synthetic a priori, but I see it quite the opposite - I think the mind isn't building or synthesizing but simplifying & generalizing so it's not so much you become, but rather, realize you always were, the X.