Be Excellent To Each Other

Most of my anxiety comes from approaching event paralysis as you put it Mimi. As soon as The Thing starts, I'm usually fine, but right up to it I feel horrible.

Weirdly, it's worst when The Thing is a meeting involving people who report to me, much easier telling people above my station why they're wrong.

That fear of The Thing makes it hard to prepare for The Thing for added self-fulfilling prophecy effect.

The lack of control thing DavPaz mentions used to make me really early for things too as some unconscious form of attempted control. I've improved by still get really stressed when Helen makes us down to the wire by doing totally unnecessary things.

Flights are totally the worst, especially if they start with waiting for a taxi.

What's worse is if you're travelling with someone who doesn't think you need to get there eight hours of ahead of time and thinks you can do it all in twenty minutes. They might be right but it's a really uncomfortable conversation. Similarly, I am in the cinema at the time on the ticket, not 30 minutes later. One day they won't show all those trailers and where would be then?

I think my worst thing is if I need to be up earlier than usual for something, I will get so worried about oversleeping that often won't sleep at all. Which is counter productive

I'm usually OK with the whole airport experience -- I err on the side of caution and generally arrive far earlier than I really need to, but I don't tend to worry too much about things.

What I do get anxious about, almost unbearably so, is specifically about how I'm going to get to the airport from my hotel or wherever.

If the outbound flight is late enough in the day that I feel like I can drive to the airport, get parked up etc. and get to the terminal in plenty of time then usually I'm OK.

But, if (like on our recent flight to Barbados, and our flight this weekend to NYC) we're flying out early in the morning, I always prefer to stay at a hotel near the airport the night before and that then gives me incredible levels of anxiety about how I'm going to get to the terminal from the hotel.

If the hotel offers airport transfers, that lessens the anxiety somewhat but I still worry that we'll miss the transfer bus, or that it'll break down, or that they won't let us on the bus or something like that.

It's much, much worse on the way back too. We stayed at an Air BnB in Barbados which obviously doesn't have any kind of airport transfer service, and because the AirBnB was a bit off the beaten track, I wasn't at all confident that I'd be able to get a taxi by calling someone (not helped by there being no central taxi dispatcher number as far as I could see)

In the end, I had to book a taxi using the Barbados equivalent of Uber, which was anxiety-inducing in its own way because the app was unfamiliar and wasn't particularly easy to use, and I had no idea whether it would charge my card automatically or whether I'd need to get the driver to charge my card etc.

It's always the part of any holiday/trip that I hate the most. If I had the choice, I'd move house so that I was relatively close to a major airport so that I didn't have all of the angst every time I decided I wanted to fly somewhere, lol.

I never used to worry about this at all, until one time that I attended a cinema screening (can't remember what movie) at Cineworld that was exclusive to their Unlimited members. I'm assuming it was kinda like a pre-release screening or something (or they just didn't have the trailer/ads reels setup) because there were no ads or trailers at all, and it really threw me for a loop.

And now I'm always super-anxious about getting to the cinema for the time on the ticket.

I booked airport transfers with a local company well in advance, and inexplicably had absolutely no record of having done so. No email confirmation, text, couldn't even remember who I'd booked them through. Was fine on the way out, get of the plane, go up to the guy with the clipboard at the taxi rank, and there we are on the list.

Flying home I had absolutely no clue what time I'd booked the cab for and no way to check

Yes, I find staying over at an airport hotel (Premier Inn Heathrow FTW!) so much easier than dashing in the morning. Citymapper and similar apps make the connection easier too. I'd prefer it if there was better pedestrian access however as waiting for a bus that might or might not arrive at stupid o'clock is more tense then calculating how long a mile walk might take me (I think Heathrow isn't even accessible at all on foot).

I don’t think any of you guys are really helping with my anxiety dreams right now, btw.

It'd better bloody be, we're staying at the Sofitel on Saturday night and I chose that hotel specifically because they say that T5 is a few minutes walk away!

The most extreme I ever took that was when I went to Amsterdam with an ex-girlfriend about 2 years before I met Jem.

I booked a hotel on the Amsterdam side that was near to the airport, precisely because I wanted it to be easy to get back to the airport for the return flight -- not realising that Schiphol airport is about 8 miles out of the city centre.

Luckily there was a very efficient rail service between the airport and the centre!

Pretty sure everyone does that. I do.

We absolutely nailed our arrival time to see the band last night, though. Walk in, get a beer, ten minutes later the band starts.

Don't forget that I arrived in the pub at exactly 8pm. So efficient

And I got on the train with ten seconds to spare!

I had a dream that we were driving past a field that had a three part gigantic mobile stage rigging, that someone had tried to obscure by covering it in trees.

We moved the trees, and it was set with thousands of cubbyholes, shaped a bit like the arches from the opening titles of The Muppet Show. Dr Zoidberg noticed that each cubbyhole had a small bird in it, nesting. Dimrill picked up one of the small birds for a cuddle, and noticed that behind each bird was a jar of marshmallows, or some candy floss, or a jar of sweets. Then Russell snored and woke me up so the rest was ruined.

I had a dream where I was on holiday and ended up dashing around a wonderful city defeating a villainous plot to do something or other.

Then my alarm went off and, as is tradition, I hit snooze.

I had what started as the same dream except the villain had managed to go back in time and trigger environmental collapse that caused the wonderful city to be flooded with raging torrents of water.

I didn't quite manage to defeat them and undo the disaster before my alarm went off again and unfortunately after that snooze my unconscious had lost interest.

I've not had dream continuity or recollection to that level for ages, and certainly nothing so clever in a very very long time.

It's terrifying when that happens!

I used to have a recurring dream, where some sort of SPECTRE type villainous outfit was attacking the block of flats where I grew up. I quickly realised I was in a dream, and that as I'd had it before, I didn't need to worry as things always worked out...

....until one dream when they just didn't, everything started to go wrong, shots that had always been taken, were missed, trying to jump over things that were suddenly too high, where there used to be 10 baddies to defeat, now there were 50.

It really felt like my subconscious was playing a long con on me, luring me, only to completely do me over. I used to dread having the dream, to see which horrible way I'd be outmatched this time.

I have not had either version of the dream in a very long time, although I still often dream of the block of flats in other contexts (It's probably the most frequent backdrop to my dreams, appearing in about 20% of them I'd think)

I find that element of dreams SO fascinating. Recurring motifs, plots, areas.

I don’t know if anyone else has it, but I have whole areas and pieces of architecture that I have made up, that I continuously go to in my dreams.

For example, there’s a huge old house that I regularly find myself in, in my dreams. It’s not a real house, and can’t be a house I’ve seen and forgotten but held in my subconscious as the layout is bonkers. For example there’s a long slide that goes from the second of three floors to the ground, sweeping from the side, across the front, and round to the other side. Plus there’s a huge bathroom that sticks out into the wide hallway, but in the back wall of that bathroom are two also it’s that lead to two huge bedrooms, and you have to go through the bathroom to access those bedrooms. There’s also a fireman’s pole that goes from a room full of plants and William Morris wallpaper, right through a really airy drawing room and straight down to the entrance hallway.

I've got a whole town, though I rarely dream in it anymore. It's Stafford although it doesn't bear any resemblance to the place, and also it has the place I worked in Winsford in it, except that doesn't bear resemblance either.

Hilariously last time I did dream in it the company I worked at next had bought it and was moving in/taking over

That was a couple of years after I'd moved to my current employer.

There have been other fantastic repeat locations and dreams but one of the most noteworthy was a medieval top-down
zelda-like where I knew some of the glitches eg a wall you could run through and end up somewhere else in the map. Literally out of body, looking down on myself in the map as I ran around.

Huh. I've just remembered it's got the old portacabin classrooms in it from grammar school too, way too many of them set on the playing fields of the other secondary school I went to.

It also has amazing bars, arcades (with real and unreal games, some of which I played) and restaurants that don't exist in reality

I sometimes dream of a little house in a meadow.

I don't know why, but it absolutely terrifies me.

Maybe we’re constructing our own forever-realms to go to when we die?

I also have a dream town. It's a combination of all the worst parts of Middlesbrough. I often get lost in sprawling council estates, or end up walking down endless terraced streets.

My primary school is blended nicely with both my high school and 6th form. It's largely consistent too