It sounds like boasting to write this, but I don’t really have anxiety dreams anymore. It’s not that I’m not anxious about anything — little could be further from the truth! — but merely that I don’t tend to dream about that, for some reason. When I was younger, those would be the kinds of dreams I’d have on a worryingly regular basis, waking up nervous and convinced that I don’t measure up, but something about growing older meant that those faded, to be replaced by stranger (and generally, more entertaining) dreams.
I say this because, last night, I had an anxiety dream, and one about the strangest, least likely thing imaginable: a podcast. Specifically, I had been drafted in to help out on particularly popular podcast I listen to, and was convinced that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong personality and just very much not what the fans of this particular podcast wanted. What was particularly amusing to me, though, was that even in the midst of this feeling of pressure and being seconds away from letting everyone down, I remember a clear sense of this is ridiculous, this is the Internet in my head. It was as if my subconscious wasn’t really willing to entertain the scenario it had generated itself.
I put this down to working online every day, and that giving me a sense of perspective when it comes to expectations. That perspective being, “Well, of course you’re going to disappoint someone. It’s the Internet. Get over it.”