A Day in the Life of...

I was awakened early by a car alarm. It's been going off regularly since around 3:30 PM. Went back to sleep immediately. Entered that twilight area of dreaming where I was asleep and dreaming and I knew it, but couldn't do anything about it. The dream turned into a nightmare. I found myself back in a molecular biology lab performing a trivial procedure. I was writing up my notes and then the head of the lab started quizzing me why the procedure went wrong. I believe he was my old postdoctoral advisor from UCLA. My stomach turned into knots and I started to become physically ill. I felt the effects in the dream and finally emerged from the weirdest nightmare I've ever experienced. Now I'm wondering why I had such a dream or suffered such an effect while in it. I started wondering if someone near me I cared about suffered a heart attack or something, as if there was a cause to the negative effect of the dream.

The end of my shift on my "Friday" was strange. Our main monitoring program died around 5:20 A.M. I tried unsuccessfully until 6:00 A.M. to reconnect to it, then started notifying the responsible people. I felt bad at having to call people so early on a Sunday morning, yet a part of me felt glad at waking some up, like the director. He was my former immediate supervisor before he became director and as far as I know still is. I don't know why I felt such emotion (unless it's the unconscious human desire to spread the pain around) since he had no part in the decision to implement this particular application. I have no clue why this app always fails on my shift almost always in the early hours of the morning on Sundays. I'm thinking it's an artifact of a backup routine, but since I have no access to the system or how it was set up, that's just a guess. Luck of the draw I suppose.