Dreamcatchers

Part 1

I hated my job.

Four years of undergraduate school followed by 5 years of postgraduate education to receive my doctorate in psychology and graduating at the top of my class only to be working scut for IDEAS - Intensive Dream Evaluation and Analysis Systems. IDEAS was the pinnacle for a psychological researcher like me. While I'd had to learn the practical side of psychology while attending university, research was my domain. I never had any inclination towards sitting in a room and listening to people discuss their problems or dealing with mental illnesses. For as long as I could remember, dreams had been interesting to me. From the day I graduated from high school and entered the psychology program at Harvard University, the top program in the country, I'd wanted nothing else but to graduate with honors and receive a position at IDEAS. They were the innovators in dream analysis and research, and were making breakthroughs everyday in sleep disorders like insomnia and night terrors.

But IDEAS was not what I expected. AT ALL. I wanted to make difference in the field of dream analysis. I wanted to be able to make it easier for people that suffer from sleep disorders related to dreams to feel safe sleeping at night. My mother had suffered from nightmares my entire life due to trauma she experienced prior to my birth and all I wanted was to know why and to help people who suffered like she had. Unfortunately, I was stuck in the basement with the dreamcatchers.

Dreamcatchers were once thought to be nothing but hocus pocus, mumbo jumbo, and gobbledygook! However, just like with many things, myth is often based in fact and science. Myth just tends to be science that hasn't been explained yet. Dreamcatchers are just one example. It turns out that the dreamcatchers originated by the Lakota Sioux were actually weaved with an design conducive to trapping dreams, but the string and wood they used was not.

Then, about ten years ago, IDEAS finally discovered the correct combination of materials to catch dreams. Well, I guess the correct way to describe what dreamcatchers do would be to say that they don't exactly catch dreams so much as draw the traumatic thoughts from the brain and trap them. Unfortunately, researchers at IDEAS have not been able to come up with a way to permanently trap the dreams. If dreamcatchers are not emptied after seven uses, then the nightmares will spill back into the dreamers' head to make room for new dreams.

That is where I come in. I don't know why I was chosen for this job - I was too young, too inexperienced, not from a family that had a prestigious name, it was the only opening - but I jumped on the opportunity to be an employee at IDEAS. I knew that if only they saw my potential and passion for this type of research, I could advance. Unfortunately, it has been a year and I am still in the basement emptying the dreamcatchers.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about my job because its monotonous and not academically stimulating enough, well, there could be more academic stimulation, but the main reason I hate my job is because I can't get their dreams out of my head. The monsters, the abuse, the screaming, the wars - it is more that a single person can, or should be able to, handle. I guess that is why I am the only one in the dreamcatcher waste department. IDEAS probably only wants to traumatize one employee at a time. No sense having multiple employees committed to the psych ward when just one will do. Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating about the psych ward, but not by much.

I've seen more trauma in my life than I've ever wanted to, and most of it wasn't my own. Granted, I've experienced a great deal of my own, but living someone else's trauma is something entirely different.

It was early February in Chicago which meant it was bitterly cold and snow and ice often coated the ground making it impassable for the average non arctic dweller. The Chicago winter suited my mood perfectly since beginning work at IDEAS. It represented the icy wall I'd put up around my heart to protect my emotions from the dreamcatchers.

February brought a lot of dreams of lost love and dying alone to the surface of people's minds. So, not only did I have to deal with my own fears of never finding love and dying without ever loving a man, but I had to deal with everyone else's.

I clocked in on February second at five in the morning just like every other day. People would be waking up to start their day and need the dreamcatchers to be primed and ready to capture new dreams as they went to bed that night. I wasn't necessarily a morning person, but I did enjoy the fact that, other than the janitorial staff, I was the only employee in the building for a few hours. I tended toward introversion. That was, I guess, the one upside to working with the dreamcatchers. No one dared bother me.

It was there in my solitude and torture that the next chapter of my life began and I found something more important than IDEAS.