Anxiety dreams of a traitor brain

I have been having a lot of anxiety dreams lately. I generally have numbers of those in the summer, disguised one way or the other, because it really freaks me out to work at a job where you don’t get paid in the summer. Nothing like three months of no paychecks. Of course I work around this: save money during school, teach summer school, work on grant projects, etc. But still, since money’s a long-time button pusher of mine, summer’s tough, and I spend May and August especially having bad dreams and not wanting to balance my checkbook (as if I ever wanted to do that).

The odd thing is that this dream hit my other big anxiety buttons: family and work. Chris and I are driving in his car with William in the back in his car seat; it’s dark, and we’re clearly coming home from somewhere. My cell phone rings, and it’s the Provost. Yep, the big guy himself. He says something to the effect of “we found your daughter,” which I know in the dream is his nice diplomatic way of saying “why haven’t you come to pick her up yet?” because suddenly it dawns on me that she’s on campus in some kind of day camp and we were supposed to pick her up hours ago. I start babbling—“thank god you finally found her, where was she?”—knowing perfectly well that she was where she was supposed to be the whole time and that we are just the world’s worst parents for forgetting our daughter.

Fortunately I can wake myself up from dreams like this (and yes, I know how fortunate I am too that these are my bad dreams, and that my life and dreams could be way worse, and that Chris and I are not the very worst parents in the world). So I wake up, and promptly begin inventing excuses for the Provost about where we were. William was in the hospital! I went to pick Chris up at the airport and there was a terrible wreck! It was quite a while before I could convince myself that since this never happened, I really didn’t need to figure out how to justify it—even just to myself. I never really got back to sleep either. Wonder why these things are so upsetting? Wonder how to stop them? My friend Lisa would probably recommend therapy.