Dreaming about work?

Nurses General Nursing

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Hello Allnurses!

It's the summertime and as you know, pt census is usually down in hospitals. Lately, since I've not been getting a lot of my hours and haven't spent much time at work, I have subsequently been dreaming/nightmaring(is that even a word? LOL) about work! Sad, I know. :rolleyes:

I've had several different kinds of dreams/nightmares lately... Mostly about having an absolutely IMPOSSIBLE amount of work to do and in a short period of time(think about 150 total care bed baths in 20 minutes:eek:).

Or, having bed alarms go off and literally jumping out of bed to run to the pt's room, boy did I feel foolish!

Last night, I dreamt that I was doing some sort of sterile procedure, and for some reason today all I can think about is putting on sterile gloves... Don't know why...

Share with us your freaky, weird, scary dreams about work!!!!

Specializes in Emergency/Cath Lab.

Wait census is supposed to be down in the summer? Our unit has been packed to capacity for the last 9 months!

I dont have dreams about work. Not anymore. And when I did, they were generally nightmares about my pts that were going downhill but I caught it and we intervened before the bad stuff happened in real life. Not the dreams though.

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Specializes in ICU, Telemetry.

I've not exactly dreamed it, but I've always been worried we'd come in to a packed house, patients in overflow, and we'd forget to assign a nurse to someone until the next morning when we'd be going, "Okay, who had Bed 3...you didn't? you didn't? I didn't! Oh, NO..."

I've also dreamed about a patient who was a known drug dealer with a violent history. I dreamed that some of his "competition" decided to thin out the suppliers by coming to the hospital to kill him, and in the process shot up my whole floor. Woke up and couldn't go back to sleep until I called work and heard them say they were all okay.

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Specializes in addictions recovery, tele, peds.

mine is always about charting.lol im forever charting and doing admissions with lots of charting

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Specializes in ICU.

I dream of work all the time, and I haven been unemployed for about 2 months.

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Specializes in CMSRN.

I have had the standard dreams like many others. But the one that stands out is not about patients.

I show up at work as usual and was told i was being floated. (Census was down at the time and other floors just did not have the staff even with low census. We rotated floats and got floated at least once a week)

I decided to chew out all nurses, screaming and hollering, throwing things. Very vivid. All the other nurses just sat and stared at me. Except one nurse's response.."so what"

Other than that nothing unusual in my dreams. Luckily I do not dream about alarms.

I will probably have a nasty dream tonight.

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Specializes in Medsurg/ICU, Mental Health, Home Health.
I've not exactly dreamed it, but I've always been worried we'd come in to a packed house, patients in overflow, and we'd forget to assign a nurse to someone until the next morning when we'd be going, "Okay, who had Bed 3...you didn't? you didn't? I didn't! Oh, NO..."

I know this post is about dreams, but this actually happened to us one night at work. We were down a nurse, and assignments were cut strangely. Mary thought Julia had patient X, Julia thought Mary did, and it all came to light when the day shift nurse had no one to give her report in the morning. Thank goodness nothing happened to the patient overnight!

I thought of another work dream. One night, I admitted a patient who was a cartoon. Not a cartoon character that exists, but literally a cartoon person. I kept paging and paging the doc because I had no idea what to do with a flippin' CARTOON PATIENT! He finally did call back, but then I woke up!

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I dream of work all the time, and I haven been unemployed for about 2 months.

Homesick ?? :(

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same as others: the patient i forgot, the call bells, bed alarms and IV pumps going off, wrong meds, wrong pts. etc it is a nightmare

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I've thrown away alarm clocks because they sounded too much like IV pump alarms. On a really bad night, I've come home, and sworn I can still hear the tele alarms. I've woken up thinking I need to change out my drips before they run empty. I've jumped up out of bed thinking I heard the LVAD alarm going off, but it was me just dreaming. I talked about work in my sleep according to my husband. I even once started palpating his arm looking for an IV site in my sleep, or so he claims.

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Specializes in Peds Medical Floor.

The med cart being possessed by the devil is pretty funny.

:devil::devil::hhmth::hhmth:

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