I've been a practicing RN for only one month now, but already I've had crazy dreams about the hospital at night. The funniest one I had-I dreamed that I walked into my unit at 3:30 AM (& I'm not even working the night shift!) & in my dream I wasn't even scheduled to work-I just pranced in to say hi to people! I then proceeded to page a doctor (for no reason of course-cuz I wasn't even on duty!) & when he called back-I literally ran & hid in the bathroom! How weird is that? Maybe I dreamed that cuz when I'm really at work-I will always think to myself "Hmm....I want to just take off. No one will even notice I'm gone, right?"
:chuckle ... and I thought I was weird. I can't remember specifics but when I get home from working night shift I wake up in the afternoon REALLY panicking that what I dreamed about happened, or that OMG I really DID forget to do that!!!! And it's horrible because half the time I can't remember if it's real or a dream. I get very paranoid. (I've been a nurse for a little over a month by the way, will be released on my own on labor day...)
Specializes in PICU, Nurse Educator, Clinical Research.
I work in a PICU with extremely acute patients....I've worked 15 shifts, as of yesterday. The bulk of our patients since i started have been cardiac babies- mostly with congenital heart defects, so they're really, really REALLY young and fragile.
Well, almost every night before i work, i dream about one of two things: either coming in on shift and picking up a patient from the previous shift and finding a million things done wrong (wrong drip hung, no chest PT done so the patient has a collapsed lung), but being blamed for every mistake made before i got there, then being fired.
The other dream is scarier- I dream that I have four patients (this should clue me in that it's a dream, since our limit is two), and I have to prime a bunch of new lines for all my patients. I start checking all the lines later and discover I've introduced air into ALL of the lines, and air bubbles are going into every patient! Then, all at once, my four patients go into respiratory arrest- so i hit the code button, and *nobody* comes to help! Which is another dream-clue, as we have a pediatric code team that makes it to codes in an instant. So, in my dream, I'm left alone with these four babies, running from one to the other, bagging them for a few seconds, then running to the next one. this lovely dream is almost always interrupted by my alarm clock, which sounds, in my dream, like monitors on the ventilators, telling me i no longer have O2!
needless to say, i wake up after these little gems *far* more tired than when I went to bed. :stone
Okay, now I keep having a different dream over & over almost every night-I keep dreaming about I & Os! I usually dream that I forget to tally them up at the end of my shift & then in my dream, I run around like mad trying to get it done before I have to give report to the next shift! How weird is that?! :)
Maybe I dreamed that cuz when I'm really at work-I will always think to myself "Hmm....I want to just take off. No one will even notice I'm gone, right?" 
shape0fmyheart
260 Posts
:chuckle ... and I thought I was weird. I can't remember specifics but when I get home from working night shift I wake up in the afternoon REALLY panicking that what I dreamed about happened, or that OMG I really DID forget to do that!!!! And it's horrible because half the time I can't remember if it's real or a dream. I get very paranoid.
(I've been a nurse for a little over a month by the way, will be released on my own on labor day...)