The email goes like this:

Dear Jen,

After four months of waiting for you to return my manuscript to me, I can only conclude that you are not planning to get back to me on this. Before I contacted you, my colleagues assured me that you were wonderful to work with. They told me about the wonderful rapport you establish with your clients, and I found that to be true. However, I have come to learn that you are good only at establishing the initial rapport to rope your clients in. After that, you are all talk and no action. I am retracting my project from you. Not only that, but my two colleagues who recommended you are also withdrawing their business from you.

Sincerely,

Pissed off client

Hours after I woke up, I could still see that email in my mind’s eye. It preyed on all of my own insecurities, which is unsurprising because my mind drafted it. I think it was also unbelievably cruel of my own mind to do that to me. I lay in bed wracking my mind for who that email could have been from. It was both a relief and a slap to find out that it was from me.

The night before that, I dreamt that I was responsible for disposing of these dead mice that were the size of cats because they had swallowed other mice whole. I can’t remember who told me to dispose of them, but I know that I didn’t think much of that person, because my solution was to put the mice down the garbage disposal and turn it on. The disposal hurled mouse blood at me, and it hit me in the face and got on my teeth. I turned off the disposal and left the mice half in and half out of the drain, and ran to look in the bathroom mirror, frantic about having mouse blood on my teeth, but unable to stop my tongue from running over it and tasting it.

When I woke up, I was half tempted to go look in the sink and see if the mice were still there.

The grant I am working on is due on Saturday at 5 p.m. They need ten hard copies of the grant, so I would like to have it done by Thursday night, so Friday the client can print it, copy it, and bind it nicely. Yesterday, after school, I had to buy shoes for two kids, jeans for two other kids, groceries, we had dinner with friends, homework, bed time, and 37 urgent emails, all of which cut into the grant-writing time.

Today, my husband called me because he left a book at home, so I walked it over to the college classroom where he was teaching. I was on my way home with two hours left before time to pick up the kids, when I ran into my neighbor. “I am on my way home,” he told me, “because the kids have an early out today.”

Perfect.

This post is indicative of that fact that a) everything is conspiring against my finishing my grant deadline this week and b) apparently, I will do anything to avoid working on it.

Do you ever have anxiety dreams like these? I think I liked mine better when they involved forgetting my chemistry class for an entire semester…