This morning I woke up in a cold sweat, with my pulse racing and an existential feeling of dread and anxiety. The clock radio alarm, went it went off, was playing “Hot Blooded” from Foreigner, which, I guess, was oddly appropriate. Seems I was having an anxiety-induced panic attack, and wasn’t immediately aware of why.

As I stood in the shower attempting to calm down, I started remembering fragmented images of what I was dreaming about before the exquisitely produced voice of Lou Gramm yanked me from my slumber:

Apparently I had been booked to play a musical set at a familiar place, a church I used to attend, which, of course, looked nothing like that place in real life, but you know how dreams are. Also on the bill were a bunch of my favorite people in my life, from all over; work, the con scene, friends I look forward to sharing a pint with, others I haven’t seen or spoken to in decades. Most of them aren’t performers in any sense of the word, but they were all on stage doing their sets. Weird stuff; interpretive dance, guided meditation, poetry readings, acrobatics, dramatic one-person monologues, martial arts form demonstrations, and yes, some music, but none of the musicians (I know a *lot* of musicians) were not doing music, and the non-performer types tended toward esoteric musical styles. I think Eurasian throat singing and didgeridoos were represented; it’s kind of vague.

As for me, I was basically set to do an hour or so of my usual acoustic singer-songwriter thing. The problem was, I had no idea when I was on the bill to perform, or even if I was performing that day, and the schedules I was able to get hold of were all out of sync with the time; the dates were wrong, the times didn’t make sense; and seemed like they were for entirely different events. On top of that, I also didn’t seem to have any kind of instrument on hand, and ended up slipping out to grab my gear, while also having to run my youngest child (who for some reason was a preschooler here) to another event across town that we were already a quarter-hour late for that involved mattresses, and was convinced that if I left, I’d miss my set and let everyone down.

My spouse was present at the event, but I wasn’t able to communicate with her for some reason. A dear friend from my musical community was supposedly the organizer (since she’s *always* the organizer IRL), but likewise, I was unable to get a straight answer from her as to when I was supposed to do my thing, but she, and others were inordinately happy I’d agreed to perform, and kept saying how much they were looking forward to it.

Also, every time I left the venue (which seemed to happen regularly, in spite of my feeling of dread about doing so), I always ended up in a different bathroom where I, for no discernible reason, always took a shower (because these dreams always involve nudity for some reason), and was always interrupted by strangers who needed to chat about something, leaving me unable to find my socks.

And finally, I was consistently worried that my set list (which I could swear got left with the gear I was worried about acquiring) had too many Beatles songs in it (I don’t typically do Beatles or Beatles-adjacent material)…

Seriously, the only thing that was missing from this weird subconscious mental conjuring was me being late for a final exam in a class I’d not attended all semester, or perhaps some kind of Freudian maternal weirdness.

Now, I’ve been under a *lot* of stress and anxiety due to occupational uncertainty, the political realities of the day, money, aging, and pharmaceutical weirdness. I often feel anxious, depressed, and unable to give proper attention to other people’s needs. This particularly lucid dream caught a lot of those feelings, and incorporated some mundane details that have cropped up recently in life…and ramped them up in ridiculously surreal circumstances.

I’m not sure what it all means, other than my subconscious trying to process and work through some stuff, but it kind of feels like I was saving all this up to deal with at once, and through the looking glass, so to speak.

Anyway, thanks for your attention to this personal exercise (or maybe I mean “exorcise”) of self-reflection and personal demons.