# Dreams/Nightmares about Work



## LucidResq (Jan 26, 2011)

Anyone else regularly dream about work? It drives me NUTS. Any funny work dreams??

One of my supervisors, who is married to a cop, dispatches calls out loud in her sleep. Unfortunately he apparently does not respond to her "traffic." 

I once had a nightmare that the dispatch center was in my house and someone was trying to run their car into the house to kill me... so I called 911... and then realized, to my horror, that I was 911. 

 I know some of you have run some crazy calls in dreamland.


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## HotelCo (Jan 26, 2011)

Never about work, but I have dreamt about my clinical site when I was doing those.

I'd be woken up by a nurse, and told they need my bed for a patient (we were in my room at the time). So, I'd get up, grab my pillow and go to the couch to sleep (which I actually did), and fall asleep. Usually a short time later it'd dawn on my that I was at home, and there were no patients, so I'd head back into my bed.


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## firetender (Jan 26, 2011)

Only one REAL nightmare, not reoccurring since I started in 1973. To the scene of a multiple MVA. I'm alone, of course. Triage. Car #1, teenager, crushed chest, gurgling blood, no can do. To car #2 as I hear kid in Car #1 drown in his own fluids. Car #2, same basic scenario-- crushing chest wound, a young girl this time. On to Car #3, and 4, and FIVE; ALL KIDS get the picture?


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## adamjh3 (Jan 26, 2011)

Just one thing directly related to work; 

We had a call, it was a CCT coming in via air ambulance 15yo M, enlarged heart, was having some weird rythms. (didn't know jack about cardiac rythms, was pretty much my first CCT and I a brand new EMT) with about a 15 minute trip from the airfield to the hospital. Mom was riding with us, I was driving. Long story short kid codes before we get to the hospital.

The thing that sticks with me was mom crying after we off-loaded. She wasn't bawling or screaming like you see on TV. It was a quiet sob, like she knew it was coming and couldn't do anything about it. The worst part was not knowing what to do to help her. That's the part I dream about, her crying. That's it. Not the kid crashing, not the nurse sticking her head up front and telling me I might want to go code. Just mom crying while I try to make myself look like I'm busy. 

On a lighter note, I do have funny dreams involving my partner quite often but not usually with us at work, as we're pretty close and hang out outside of work.


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## firetender (Jan 26, 2011)

*Who's dreaming What?*



adamjh3 said:


> That's the part I dream about, her crying. That's it. Not the kid crashing, not the nurse sticking her head up front and telling me I might want to go code. Just mom crying while I try to make myself look like I'm busy.



Dreams are often like mirrors, where the characters in them are you, just with a different face. When they hit a raw spot, as this did with you, usually it's  trying to tell you something. Kind of like an echo of yourself.

For me, for example, _*I was the kids in the cars.*_ One by one they were left to suffer alone and die. That pretty much paints the picture of my numerous emotional childhood deaths and abandonments; I couldn't do anything to save myself from them.

Dreams are actually fun to play with. If you get weird, like I did, you learn that EMS serves as a metaphor for some incredibly huge, human stuff. That's one of the perks of the job!


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## usafmedic45 (Jan 26, 2011)

I used to have nightmares about some stuff I saw in the military and about the death of my friend John in a car accident.   Proper medication and the love of a great woman have vastly reduced the frequency and severity over the past couple of years.


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## dmc2007 (Jan 28, 2011)

I once woke up to the beeping of my alarm clock.  Rather than hit the snooze button like a normal person, I perked right up and waited for dispatch information.


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## clibb (Jan 28, 2011)

I have heard the dispatch tone go out in my dream. I will get up, get dressed, walk out and be like "WTF am I doing?" and go back to bed.
When I used to do insulation I would get up in the middle of my dream and go upstairs to grab the ladder, bring it down, set it on my desk, and go back to sleep.


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## DarkStarr (Jan 31, 2011)

dmc2007 said:


> I once woke up to the beeping of my alarm clock.  Rather than hit the snooze button like a normal person, I perked right up and waited for dispatch information.



damn, sometimes my pager goes off and ill reset it and hope for at least 9 more minutes before second alert!!!




































(sike!)


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## MrBrown (Jan 31, 2011)

Brown had a dream about work the other night.

Also, the order done ding-a-ling thingo at Haggendas sounds a lot like our station alarm.  That was funny.


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## medicRob (Jan 31, 2011)

LucidResq said:


> Anyone else regularly dream about work? It drives me NUTS. Any funny work dreams??
> 
> One of my supervisors, who is married to a cop, dispatches calls out loud in her sleep. Unfortunately he apparently does not respond to her "traffic."
> 
> ...



Yeah, there are two particular cases that I dream about regularly.. I'd rather not talk about them though.


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## Seaglass (Feb 1, 2011)

Not often, for me. Right before my meeting with my medical director to review my first code, I had the entire call play out again in a dream. Everything was the same, except that the pt came back. It actually helped reassure me that we'd done all we could, which is what the review found. 

I have dreams featuring coworkers and my station all the time, but that's normal. If I see anything often enough, it'll show up in a dream at some point. 



clibb said:


> I have heard the dispatch tone go out in my dream. I will get up, get dressed, walk out and be like "WTF am I doing?" and go back to bed.



Me too, especially when I'm sleeping on duty. At this point, I've learned to check to see whether the alert light has actually come on before I move.


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## spike91 (Feb 3, 2011)

There's only been one call that's left me with occasional bad dreams, none recently though. A week or so ago on shift my friend told me that I sat straight up in the middle of a dead sleep, yelled "Kelly, tone out PD!" and went right back to sleep. So apparently it happens more than I remember, but nothing that has been truly bothersome to date (knock on wood)


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## firetender (Feb 3, 2011)

*For Your Entertainment...*



clibb said:


> I have heard the dispatch tone go out in my dream. I will get up, get dressed, walk out and be like "WTF am I doing?" and go back to bed.
> When I used to do insulation I would get up in the middle of my dream and go upstairs to grab the ladder, bring it down, set it on my desk, and go back to sleep.



*From Chapter 5: Moments in the Death of a Flesh Mechanic...a healer's rebirth*
 [FONT=&quot]





> I was barely sure whose dream or nightmare this was.
> [/FONT]
> [FONT=&quot]
> [/FONT]
> ...


[/FONT]


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## 22cent (Feb 3, 2011)

*False Start*

I have fairly lucid dreams about work but the ones I rememeber are when I'm woken up to a page or the dream of a page. On more than a few occasions, I'll pop up, get ready, go out to the rig just to realize nothing happened. After a few minutes, a real page would go out and I was already out there. My crew thought I was just staying up and working on something in the bay, nobody really believed I heard a page 5 minutes before it actually happened.  I figured I was psychic or something but it doesn't really happen anymore.


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## TransportJockey (Feb 3, 2011)

LucidResq said:


> Anyone else regularly dream about work? It drives me NUTS. Any funny work dreams??
> 
> One of my supervisors, who is married to a cop, dispatches calls out loud in her sleep. Unfortunately he apparently does not respond to her "traffic."
> 
> ...



There are three calls in particular that I have had and still sometimes have nightmares about. 

Although like most I have heard tones go off in my sleep that wake me up right away. Luckily if I see I'm at my apartment (unless it's one of my nights on-call) I just got right back to sleep


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## JJR512 (Feb 3, 2011)

I actually had a dream the other night in which I was driving an ambulance. I was driving a patient priority one to the hospital in a county FD ambulance. It was night. We were approaching an overpass when I saw something small and glowing fly off the overpass. It headed in my general direction extremely fast, so quickly that I didn't really have time to think or do anything. It seemed to me like it went over the ambulance so I looked in the driver's side mirror to see if I could see what became of it, which is when I saw the car behind me explode in a giant fireball.

I remember that after I woke up, I could remember more of the dream than that, but that's all I can remember now. And that's how it usually is for me and dreams. Usually I don't remember them at all, but sometimes when I wake up I have a pretty good recollection of a dream but it quickly fades, leaving only a highlight or two, or a general impression.


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## Canadamedic24 (Aug 4, 2018)

I’ve had multiple dreams of myself being stabbed while on a call and of my partner and I being attacked/threatened/cornered with no escape. I work in a violent city and in a particularly violent area of the city as well. I’ve never been in an immediate life threatening situation on the job. Have obviously been in sketchy scenes and dealt with volatile and unpredictable patients but these dreams are so real and terrifying.


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## Bullets (Aug 5, 2018)

Does dreaming about the nursing staff count?

Beyond hearing the call bell in my sleep for a bit, i never really had any dreams about work, thankfully.


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## Chimpie (Aug 5, 2018)

Canadamedic24 said:


> I’ve had multiple dreams of myself being stabbed while on a call and of my partner and I being attacked/threatened/cornered with no escape. I work in a violent city and in a particularly violent area of the city as well. I’ve never been in an immediate life threatening situation on the job. Have obviously been in sketchy scenes and dealt with volatile and unpredictable patients but these dreams are so real and terrifying.



I've never had terrifying dreams before, but dreams about process and procedures, sure.

There's no shame in talking to a professional about this. Seeking assistance with decompressing or relaxing after a shift might help you sleep better.


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## Summit (Aug 5, 2018)

Not in a long time.
But I hear the alarms when I try to sleep.


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## johnrsemt (Aug 6, 2018)

Since I moved to an area where we are NOT busy; and I work with people that have not worked in a busy service;  I don't have the old fashioned way to blow off steam of just talking about bad runs with coworkers.  {My fire department not to long after I started brought in someone for CISD [one of our classmates died in an apartment fire]  we made the counselor cry}.   Doing CISD has never seemed to work for me.
  Not even talking about particular runs seems to help me;  just talking about stuff we have seen helps the best,  but I can't do that with co workers here at my FT job.  

  about 3 years ago I started having nightmares about runs, and about things that didn't happen but could have;  and patients (especially babies) asking me why I didn't save them:   Patients that there was nothing I could have done to save them, unless I could have gotten there hours earlier and beaten the mothers boyfriend bloody, before he did that to the baby.

   So I started working PT 2 years ago at a busier service, and that has seemed to help a little;  some of the people have been doing EMS long enough that we can talk (and joke) about bad stuff we have seen and done and that actually helps.
   And I started counseling a few months ago,  and that has seemed to help some too


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