'Sell your waking life for minimum wage, but now they get your dreams for free'

At work again.

Large area with many people working at very informal terminals. My BOSS boss is there and he seems to sense something is going on in Jackson, one of the cities whose newspaper we lay out. He goes into a Very Important Meeting and finds out that the editor there has gathered his people to announce that one of their writers hanged himself. Everyone is aghast. My dream self imagines that guy's column sig and how we just put it on a page recently.

///

I am stressing out. The sun has come up and I am still at work, trying to get away, get out the door, go the fuck home. It's not our real-life office but some kind of posh suburban setting that's more like a sprawling Colonial-accented ranch-style house with a meticulously manicured lawn. People keep coming to me, needing me to help them put out fires. I'm exhausted and exasperated. I can feel the cool, damp morning air settle in on my skin and clothes from the previous day and it's making me feel bottom-of-the-barrel awful.

My boss comes in, apparently straight from the bar across the street. I can't tell he's drunk until he announces he is and then starts acting completely crazy. He doesn't look like himself — dream boss is more squat and burly than real boss. He does something to a chair near me — grabs it and shakes it, maybe? — that is the final straw. I explode and leave.

When I finally get outside, I freak out because I can't find my car. Then I remember that that's because I carpooled in a bus to work from the location where my car was actually parked.

The worst bartender ever

I'm at a bar, but I think it's a bar and a deli. (Do those exist? Because that kinda sounds like a good idea.) My husband is around somewhere, but he's getting ready to leave on a trip for a while. Maybe we're at the airport?

I'm hovering around the bar waiting to order a drink. It's very bright in there, reminiscent of school cafeteria lighting more than bar lighting. The bar has a white counter and a light wood railing. A very cheap oak, maybe Formica even. I order a mixed drink and an inexperienced bartender starts to make it. I see her messing it up, but I don't say anything.

Either while I'm paying or right after I've paid, a short, fat man without much hair is standing in front of me behind the bar. He holds a napkin over his hands, and then holds them out over me, over my lap. I see a drop of blood fall onto my leg and panic, but when he points out he pricked his finger (and it wasn't my blood) I calm down a little. As I start to ask him why he did that, he holds the needle toward me and grazes my arm with it.

My skin doesn't break, but there's a scraping sensation and a line where it was scratched. Somehow, I find out the man has HIV. He's laughing at me. I am stunned and can't move for a minute. The panic rushes back in.

I race out of the bar to find my husband and tell him what happened. I look everywhere, and just when I am about to break down in tears I find him and he begins to reassure me everything will be OK. We'll get it taken care of. We'll figure it out.