Sweet Dreams, Baby! Tell us about your strange dreams r/t nursing

Nurses General Nursing

Published

  1. How often do you dream about nursing?

    • 41
      Always
    • 116
      Frequently but not all the time
    • 130
      Sometimes
    • 31
      Never

318 members have participated

Nursing is nothing if not an intense occupation. Sometimes we dream about it.

I just woke up horrified to discover that I had five out of seven patients that I never got a chance to look at or assess for the entire shift! :uhoh3:

So glad THAT's never happened in real life, but it's 0530 and there's no way I'm gonna be able to sleep.

How often do you dream about your job?

Specializes in Psychiatric.

I used to dream about working in the hospital all the time. It was draining because not only did I work 12 hours a day but then I dreamt about it for 8 hours. I felt like I was always at work.

I haven't worked in the hospital for 2 years now but I still dream about it. I still have nightmares about what I haven't done. I hope I make peace with that part of my life soon!! :)

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Specializes in Utilization Management.

Dreamt I was working as usual, except that I had to have a tiger work with me during the shift. The tiger was not very docile, so I was trying to take care of my patients while trying to keep the tiger from eating all of us.

Didn't sleep too well. :(

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Specializes in cardiology-now CTICU.

i recently dreamed that a large man i had taken care of for the weekend was falling out of bed head first and no one would help me. there i was, holding him by the shoulders, vent alarming, swan pulling out, trying to keep him from falling and all my co-workers outside the room going about their business. that is a fairy accurate dramatization of my unit though...

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Specializes in ortho/neuro/general surgery.

I had a dream that some kind of nasty crisis had hit my town, probably related to the Super Volcano show I'd been watching.

People were flooding into the hospital and instead of the Operation Assembly we're supposed to follow, it was total chaos. I had a patient with chest pain and I had already tried to get the techs to come do an EKG and lab to draw blood but I wanted to tell the internal med doc what was going on. When he came up to the floor, in the midst of all the chaos, I tried to tell him what was going on with my pt. He looked me straight in the eye and said "Why?" "So you can get ready?". In the dream it was creepy because I knew he was saying that because everyone was gonna die.

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Specializes in Emergency Midwifery.

I have a familiar theme to my dreams. I frequently dream that I am a patient in my hospital and that I need to fight another patient for a bed.

One dream involved me being admitted to surgical ward because there were no beds left and I even had to carbolise and make my own bed because there were no nurses to do it.

My most recent dream involved me haemorrhaging in the shower and passing a clot the size of a newborn child. I remember calling 000 (911) but have no idea how I got to the ER. Once in the ER I found a woman in my bed with my O2 and IV! I proceded to argue with her and kicked her out of my bed stating she had no business being here because she wasn't sick!

Then I woke up.

Sad thing is that I am on holidays at the moment and wish I could forget about work while I am away. Wish I could work out why I dream about being a patient when there are bed shortages???

Nicky.

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Specializes in Community, OB, Nursery.

Once I had a dream that I had a home birth (would love to) and that one of the L/D nurses from my facility came and brought me fried shrimp and broccoli. :confused:

Similar dream, with a different L/D nurse catching the baby this time, a little girl who weighed 12 lbs :eek: and no tears.

Once I dreamed that I had meds to give a baby in the nursery and he was right across the room but I couldn't get to him cause people kept standing in my way. Made me so freaking mad.

Often I dream that I'm working 12 hours and about halfway through my shift realize that I have yet to assess one of my patients.

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Specializes in ER, IICU, PCU, PACU, EMS.

I had a recent dream that I was home sleeping when a doctor called my house in the middle of the night and starting barking orders over the phone. I jumped up and wrote them all down and clarified them until I realized that I wasn't on shift and told him that. He got really angry and told me to carry them out anyway then hung up. I had no idea who the patient was.

I really hate it when they call me at home!! :lol2:

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Specializes in OB, M/S, HH, Medical Imaging RN.

I dreamed much more frequently about nursing when I worked Med/Surg. It was always the same type of dream. Either I kept getting so side tracked that I couldn't get to work until half the shift was over or I'd get home and realize I hadn't given any meds all day.

In HH they were more like nightmares because I'd relive getting lost all the time when I was working out of Nashville. The interstates went together like a plate of spaghetti noodles. Then doing HH in my own town in the rural areas those dreams stopped.

In Radiology I have pleasant dreams.

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Specializes in OB, M/S, HH, Medical Imaging RN.
I had a recent dream that I was home sleeping when a doctor called my house in the middle of the night and starting barking orders over the phone. I jumped up and wrote them all down and clarified them until I realized that I wasn't on shift and told him that. He got really angry and told me to carry them out anyway then hung up. I had no idea who the patient was.

I really hate it when they call me at home!! :lol2:

I had that happen to me once. A doctor (the feared one) called me late at night at home and chewed me out about a patient and had a gazillion questions about the patients meds that day. When I finally got a word in edgewise I explained that I'd been off for 4 days. Goodnight doctor. He never mentioned it.

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Specializes in Ante-Intra-Postpartum, Post Gyne.

I had a strange dream last night kinda related to nursing. I am waiting to have children until I am done with school, my husband on the other hand would love to have kids right now. Anyway, I dreamt that my husband was tired of waiting for me to finish school so he got one of his sperm and another woman's egg and impregnated himself like in that Arnold Schwarzenegger movie "Junior" and I was too busy with nursing school to notice until I walked in on him getting a

c-section......yeah weird.

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Specializes in LTC, Med/Surg, Peds, ICU, Tele.
Nursing is nothing if not an intense occupation. Sometimes we dream about it.

I just woke up horrified to discover that I had five out of seven patients that I never got a chance to look at or assess for the entire shift! :uhoh3:

So glad THAT's never happened in real life, but it's 0530 and there's no way I'm gonna be able to sleep.

How often do you dream about your job?

There you have it, my standard nursing anxiety dream :uhoh3:

I had one just the other day. I knew I was sleeping, and my ICU was in our living room and no one was minding the patients while I slept. That was a new twist on the above theme.

I alse dream of scenarios where some of my coworkers play roles. :trout:

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Specializes in Med-Surg, ED.

I dreamed the other night that I was a nurse caring for a mother and her newborn baby who was about 4" long but full term. The mother went out for a cigarette and I had to carry the baby.

I was horrified to look down and see that not only did I have a saline-lock in my arm (the kind with the stop cock) but also that the teeny little baby was stuck to the tegaderm!

The mother came back and told me that she knew how to get the baby off the tegaderm and yanked the baby off my arm. Which turned the stopcock and I immediately began hemorrhaging. I remember watching the tubing fly around like a firehose, shooting my blood all over. Everyone ran out of the room and someone came in and said I needed oxygen. They put a rebreather mask on my face but it didnt work, somehow there was no way for the o2 to get in and I was suffocating, meanwhile I was feeling my blood on my face.

Terrible dream, that one.

Usually I just dream that I have gotten to the end of my shift and am giving report when I realize that I had a patient that I didn't know about, and didn't see the whole time.

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