It’s been a while since I wrote much stage management content, so today I thought we’d take a break from personal finance and I’d ramble a little bit about the absolutely insane dreams that sometimes accompany some shows.

I recently worked a fairly high stress festival on minimal sleep for the week and I have found that this week, as I recover from that exhaustion, I can’t stop dreaming about work.

I literally fall asleep and it feels like I’m back there in the booth, doing my job calling all the cues to move the talent around backstage and in the holding areas. We were moving thousands of people each night so it was a fairly complicated endeavour.

And while I was actually doing it last week, it was fine. The days were just incredibly long with rehearsals starting around 8 AM through the end of show until around 9:30/10 PM. I’d go home and make the schedule for the next day, which took a few hours and I was usually back onsite around 7 AM, so I was running on 4-6 hours of sleep a night for the week.

It was not very pleasant. Though the job was overall kind of fun.

And this whole week that I have been home, the dreams have just been viscerally real. I wake up and feel like I haven’t even slept because my brain just organized thousands of dream people and barked orders to move them around all night like a crazy woman.

Some sort of post event-PTSD.

One of my first very vivid work dreams I ever remember having occurred in college and I can still remember it. I dreamt we were doing a lighting call late at night and we ran out of green gels, so I had to smear all the lights with toothpaste.

But all least that dream was insane.

These dreams are all just my brain literally going back to work in my sleep. The only other time it has happened to this level was on the tour of Fame I did about seven years ago.

For the first two weeks of that job, I would fall asleep every night and call the show in my dreams until I woke up. It was completely maddening. It felt like there was a never a free second from the job.

I feel there is a correlation here between jobs that also don’t allow for enough sleep, since that Fame tour had a completely insane one-nighters schedule where we often finished the day between 1 and 2 AM and began load in the following day at 8 AM.

I can’t say it ever feels like a mental health win when my mind is in that level of overdrive but I’ve never figured out how to calm it down other than to just deeply sigh and know at some point it will stop. Until then, I will continue to try to perfect calls to move thousands of performers before the next motorcade blocks the road I need them to cross in my sleep, for a gig that ended more than a week ago. That I will never have to call again.

Sigh.

Do you ever have recurring work dreams that make it feel like you are definitely still at work? Do you have any tips for getting rid of them? Asking for a friend here.