I'm wandering through a mall. It has a mix of stores including some from the mall I used to shop in as a teen, and the mall my kids like to shop in now. I'm looking for something, and I have money to buy it, but not much extra. I know that I have somewhere else I have to go next, and that's going to take up the bulk of the rest of my day, but right now, the shopping is more important.
My reason for shopping is kind of vague. I'm not looking for a specific thing. I'm here because I "have to" buy something for myself. It feels like fact of the source from which the money came to me somehow makes it by definition something between a gift and "found money," but I also have a sense of having earned it. There was definitely some reason why it was owed to me.
I have a sense of responsibility and burden related to how the money is to be spent. It has to be something I'll want and like, but not something totally frivolous. I'm trying to also make sure it is something that won't get used up, expire, or quickly become obsolete. It feels as though failing to meet those conditions will mean I have wasted the money.
The feeling is partly related to the fact that it is being spent on me and not members of my family, on whom I am usually focused when shopping. It's a rare thing for me to buy something just for myself, and when I do, it's usually because there is a practical and necessary reason why I am buying it (like work clothing or allergy medicine) and not just because it's something I really want.
The feeling I have is also partly related to how the money ended up being owed to me. I have the sense that personal sacrifice was wrongfully forced upon me by the source of the money. That personal sacrifice cost my family things we needed. The source "gifted" me to avoid some being made to pay me more. I had accepted the amount to avoid the risk of getting nothing. Now, I feel kind of pinched, like I have less than I need, and need to make every penny count.
Everywhere I go in the mall, people are watching me. I feel like they are judging everything I look at, weighing whether or not I should even be considering this or that item. I have the sense of these people thinking I don't deserve to use any of this money on myself, even though I am supposed to do exactly that. At the same time, I have the sense of them keeping track, with the intent to report back to the source from which the money came, as if a wrongful purchase would justify the source taking it back.. That would not be the case, but I'm not sure the source wouldn't try, and having to deal with that would create a huge inconvenience for my family.
I feel upset about being watched. I feel stalked and personally invaded. Most people are trying to be subtle about it, making sure to appear to be checking out something near me if I actually look in their direction, but there are a few who are blatantly following me around and staring.
I can't even interact with the people around me. I compliment a woman's manicure, and instead of thanking me, she tells me I don't need a manicure. I had no intention of seeking one, nor would I want one. I was just enjoying the sight of hers, which was pretty cool. I have no use for a manicure. However, I'm really put off that she said that to me. It felt like she was telling me that I'm beneath her, that I'm not quality enough to qualify for a manicure. Even though I am uninterested in my fingernails beyond utility and prevention of injury to my fingers, I'm offended that this woman feels entitled to give or deny permission for me to have a manicure, and also that she jumped to the conclusion that I even wanted one. First, it's my fingers and my money, and therefore my decision. Second, a stranger has no right to make assumptions about my personal choices like that.
Another bystander won't let me pass when I want to go down one aisle at a shop and ask him to please excuse me. I'm told, "you don't need to look down there. There's nothing you should be interested in." The aisle has craft supplies that I'm considering using to make things I can sell. The man says, "No one wants to buy your doilies," but that's not the image I was thinking about. I have patterns for jewelry and other accessories, including hats, gloves, and bags. Again, I'm offended that he feels entitled to make that determination for me, but because everyone is watching, I'm nervous about any kind of a confrontation.
I'm also offended at his attitude toward my crafts. I've sold them before. I have had a decent response at small flea markets. People do like them. I just don't have the time to make that a regular activity because I work full time. Regardless, a complete stranger has no way of assessing the desirability of my work, and no business critiquing it unseen or making assumptions about the potential success of a venture. Even if he chooses to do that, he has no right to enforce his opinion of me upon me this way. I don't feel obligated to tolerate what he has said.
Looking around, I see a lady speaking into what looks like either an old cell phone or a two-way transmitter. She's staring at me, and speaking quietly, but I catch a couple of words and phrases: "Willful" and "refusing to be shaped" and "seems to feel entitled to decide for herself." I'm pretty sure she's talking about me, but I feel like some kind of a paranoid egotist for the thought. Then she says my full name into the phone. Of all things, this makes me feel very relieved, because I was beginning to feel nuts for believing this was all about me. Now, I feel justified in resisting it because it's real.
I levitate into the air and fly over the jerk who won't let me get my crafts. Lowering myself down on the other side as he stares at me with his jaw dropped, I assess the benefits and drawbacks of this potential purchase. I still have several months of visitation with my stepdaughter during which I'll be riding back and forth in the car to her place twice a month for an hour each way. I could get a lot of crafting done during this time.
I could spend about 10% of the money, buy the supplies, and set up a shop online that would only allow the amount of product I've added to it to be ordered, so I couldn't get behind. I take out a little notebook and write down the idea, the cost of the supplies, and give it a rating. As I'm doing this, everyone in the store begins rapidly moving toward me in an aggressive manner (except the cashiers, who appear oblivious of the whole thing.) The woman with the communication device is shouting into it, something about broken rules, decisions, and my not being boxed in. People are yelling at me, "You can't do that! You're not allowed!" A woman from the organization from which the money came demands my notebook, yelling that I don't have the right to keep notes, and if I'm going to make any claims, I have to do it all from memory.
Just as the other patrons approach, I fly up and away from the spot. I move on to another shop which has household items that I feel would reduce the amount of time I spend doing housework, while simultaneously increasing the tidiness of my family's apartment. As I near the store, I notice there is a barricade of people blocking my path, standing with their arms linked and angry expressions on their faces. They tell me I can't go in there.
I move around them, open a hole in the wall, and enter the store. Then, I pull down the mesh door that keeps patrons out after the store is closed. As I shop the store, the people outside of it scream at me and pound at the mesh door. I concentrate for a moment on repelling them from the door. It crackles, and then suddenly they are all zapped like they had touched an electric fence. Everyone jumps back, surprised into silence.
Among the crowd, I see three people I recognize as part of the organization that is the source of the money. I realize they are manipulating the crowd. I point at them, and shout "LIGHT!" Each of them is now surrounded by brightness as if shined upon by a spotlight. Then, I shout, "TRUTH!" All three people begin to look uncomfortable, as if trying really hard not to lose control of a bodily function, while simultaneously knowing that relief is not readily available. Then, they look like they are going to vomit. People start backing away from them. I walk away, and begin assessing the possibilities for the items available in the store, making notes in my little notebook and writing down prices and ratings of benefit to my family. These are the pros and cons of the decision (as in, pro - it will tidy up the clutter in the bathroom; con - it costs 5% of my little budget.)
I can hear one voice telling everyone in the crowd what led to my receiving the money I'm here to spend. It isn't the voice of one of them, but another, bigger voice which seems to be coming over the loudspeakers. I stop shopping and look out the door to see everyone backing away from the three. The faces in the crowd look appalled and outraged, and some of them begin muttering and pointing. The three look nervous, then scared. One of them starts shouting counter-accusations, but no one listens. People in the crowd start throwing things at the three. Some of the items are actually heavy and solid enough to hurt.
Righteously indignant as I am about what originally happened and about the conspiracy that followed, I know this is wrong and am highly averse to letting it happen. As soon as I desire to exit the store and interfere, the mesh door rises back into the wall on its own. I bellow "STOP!" at the crowd, and they do. Everyone looks at me. I tell them that what happened has all ready been taken care of, that the organization has settled with me, and I accepted the settlement. The debt is paid, and we're even. No further action is necessary. I ask that everyone just let me shop in peace. Even though I still feel anger over the incident pulling at my heart, I know it's wrong to wish harm upon someone who wronged me after penance has been done for the wrong, and it's not these people's battle to fight, anyway. Getting them involved would be dishonest and manipulative of me, and mean both to her and them, because she would be unjustly harmed, and they would be guilty of that harm.
I see a sense of letdown settle into the crowd, and they begin to disperse, going into other stores and wandering along the hallway of the mall. The two men sort of back off and fade into the crowd. The woman of the three tries approaching some of the wandering shoppers, inviting them to "hang out" and shop together. They blow her off in no uncertain terms, some of them demonstrating disgust, others anger, and still others a simple lack of trust. She seems surprised by this, and I realize that until this moment, she's never not had a rapport with the local public and she doesn't know how to handle it. There's nothing I can do to fix that. She showed them a false face and now they know differently. The only one who can repair that bridge is her.
She glares fiercely at me. Her face looks really creepy. I almost expect her to bite me. Instead, she points a finger and wails, "THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!" She begins cussing me out, claiming that I had no right to buck her authority and protect myself from her. She shouts that I'd better watch my step, because she'll be waiting for an opportunity to get me back for this. I don't feel intimidated, but I'm kind of miffed that she feels entitled to any authority over any aspect of my personal well-being. She can be in charge of that which is her territory all she wants, but I belong to myself, and I have the right to be unharmed.
Because of the way the money came to me, I am no longer involved with that which is her territory. I'm not required to have anything to do with her, and I'm not required to permit her any involvement in or access to knowledge of my existence. If she attempts to enforce upon me even the least bit of exposure to her, I can file charges and she will be in trouble. I let her rant for a moment, then smile and tell her, "That's really not your call."
This infuriates her so much that she totally loses control. She starts grabbing the items on the floor around her and flinging them at me. Nothing hits, but other people notice what she is doing. The lady with the communication device starts speaking into it again. The angry woman runs out of things to throw. She looks flummoxed for a moment, then reaches into the back of her pants, pulls out a huge turd, and throws that directly at me. I hold up a hand and think about pushing it away. It flies up into the air, hits the ceiling, and sticks.
Two mall security guards arrive and tell the woman she has to leave. They are accompanied by two higher-ups in the organization from which I received the money. The higher-ups aren't directly requesting anything, but they do identify the woman for the guards. They walk away. In the crowd, I can see her two compatriots trying to look uninvolved. She notices them, and says, "I'm with them! You can't make me leave because I'm with them!" The guards ask the men, and the men tell the guards that they don't have anything to do with her. They basically disown her to keep from being thrown out with her.
She tells the guards she has the right to be here, and that I'm the one who should be thrown out because I've disrupted the whole mall by being here when I wasn't welcome. The lady with the communication device, which I can now see is some kind of smart phone with what looks like a mini-hard drive on the back of it, tells the guards that the disruption was caused by manipulative lies fed to the shoppers by the organization, not by my presence. She states that the woman had become violent and was throwing things at me. She points out the things on the ground around me and says that the woman threw all of them.
The woman says there is no proof, because there is no video. She tells the guard that I'm covered in feces and I'm a health hazard. The lack of feces upon my person is clearly visible, and the guard gives her a wary, concerned look you usually see given to people who are starting to sound crazy. At that moment, the poop on the ceiling falls on her head. It runs down her hair onto her clothes. The lady with the smart phone tells the guards that the woman had thrown that at me, too.
The guards inform the poop covered woman that they now cannot believe anything she says. They pull out what look like a couple of those extended reach grabbing devices used by short people to get things off of high shelves, only these are metal, and the grabber at the end looks like a handcuff. They quickly snap these onto her wrists, and step apart. Keeping her at arms length with her hands out from her body, they march her toward the mall exit.
Finally, I have what I want. She is not going to bother me any more. No one is paying any attention to me. I am free to decide how to best invest the money I've received, and then I can get on with my everyday stuff. I turn to go back into the household goods store. Inside the store is my Grandma. She's going to help me shop. I haven't seen her in years, and I'm so happy to see her I run up and give her a huge hug.
I'm so relieved for this to be over that I almost start crying, but Grandma reminds me that we have things to do, so instead I turn to look with her at items on the shelves. There are items for storage. I am worrying over whether to get a set with several different sizes, or a set that has several bigger sizes but less of a variety. It is also a few dollars less than the other, because it's not brand name. Grandma reminds me of one of her old sayings, "That which holds a lot will also hold a little." Knowing she is right, I write down the price and benefits of the bigger items.
I nearly burst into tears when I woke from this one. The reason I haven't seen Grandma in years is because she died in 1994. She was a huge guiding influence in my life over many things, including the aspects of my attitude that would lead me to do something like telling the crowd in the dream to stop attacking the people who had hurt me, because that situation was all ready over. Grandma did not have a vengeful bone in her entire body. She was a very caring and compassionate woman who had an aversion to unnecessary drama, but sought to heal the hurts of the people around her. To this day, I often make decisions based on the thought of "What Would Grandma Do?"
This dream, I think, was based on a specific situation I'm going through in waking life. A few months ago, I was injured at work.. It was a life-threatening injury, but one with a fairly quick recovery. I was given permission from a doctor to return to work, but with a restriction that my employer refused to accept, so I was put on a temporary leave until the restriction expired. I filed a complaint with OSHA while receiving treatment for the injury during that time.
OSHA investigated and cited my employer for two serious violations, and levied a fine for each. The next day, my employer changed the requirements for my return to work, and refused to let me use earned vacation hours for my time off. I fulfilled the new requirements, but was not returned to work. Instead, my employer changed the requirements again. This continued for two months. During the first month, my family ran through our small savings, and I had to apply for government assistance, including unemployment.
During the second month, I realized what my employer was doing, and filed a retaliation complaint with the labor board After my complaint had been initiated, my employer attempted to prevent me from receiving unemployment by claiming that I was on voluntary leave due to an illness. I had to write to my case worker explaining what was going on, and it was ultimately the case worker's choice to award me unemployment that got me approved to return to work. Then, the company used my originally doctor-approved return to work date to keep me from receiving Worker's Compensation for any of the time I'd been kept off of work following my injury. The industrial commission found in my favor for the medical bills, but in the company's favor for the lost time.
It is the combination of those two communications, the choice to alter my return to work requirements, and the choice to withhold my vacation hours during my absence that are cited in my retaliation complaint. My labor case worker has assessed an amount owed totaling what I would have earned between the doctor-approved return to work date and the date I actually was put back on the schedule. My employer can choose to pay the amount, offer a smaller settlement, or fight the claim.
The case worker has advised me that most employers offer a settlement, and that I'll get paid much sooner if I accept it. Given my situation, if they offer a reasonable settlement, I'll take it. I'll have to pay the state's portion of the unemployment I received back to the state (not because the state will make me, but because it's the right thing to do) but by my definition of reasonable, I should be left with a full month's worth of pay after doing that.
In the meantime, I'm back to work for the same boss who allowed the conditions which injured me. The company was aware of the existence of the conditions, having been informed of them repeatedly during the past 5 years. The boss basically said that she didn't have to follow OSHA regulations because of the size of the building, a ridiculous statement.
She is furious with me for having filed a complaint for the dangerous working conditions. I am now being subjected to a hostile work environment. I think that environment, and my concerns about reaching a settlement with the company, are what this dream was about. I think the shoppers represent my coworkers and people from the neighborhood who shop at my workplace. I think the shopping represents my boss's efforts to get back at me for my complaint, my efforts to defend myself, and my concerns about whether or not I will even receive anything in response to the complaint.
My boss waits until we are alone and off camera and makes threats. She has told me that she's going to "get me on something" and as soon as she gets an opportunity, I'm "out of here." She gives me the hardest jobs we have, and I am the only employee not permitted breaks. I even get the third degree for having to use the restroom or needing to have anything to drink during a 9-hour shift. I more than half expect her to make up an excuse to fire me. I think the loudspeaker portion of the dream is my recent decision that if she does, I'm going to the local press with my story.
My boss is trying to use psychological abuse to psych me out and make me screw up. She messes with the area I'm assigned to work in so that things are out of place and conditions are in place to create messes for me to clean up (like propping breakable containers of liquid overhead where they'll fall when I touch the unstable shelves they are on). She sends me away from what I've been told to work on, to go do something else momentarily, and rearranges my stuff so that it's just disorganized enough to slow me down a bit when I return. This has included putting bills in the wrong slots in my register so that I have trouble making change for customers.
She has given me orders and then yelled at me for following them, even going so far as to threaten to "write me up" for doing exactly what I was told moments earlier. However, she refuses to write down what she wants me to do.
She has said things to my customers (who are also my neighbors) about me, and had friends of hers come into our store and give me a rough time at the cash register. She has brought things she knows I'm allergic to into the store in order to cause irritation. She has lied to my co-workers about me. She spends the day periodically stopping her activities to stand and glare at me as if I've just done or said something wrong. She has taken my paperwork so that I can't keep track of what I'm doing.
She makes a point to give derogatory, condescending, or insulting replies to things I say, even when I am not talking to her. Often, these are statements designed to insinuate that I am challenging her authority when nothing I've said indicates that, such as replying to an "ok, got it" (an acknowledgment that I comprehend the meaning of an order or other statement given to me) with a comment like, "Well I HOPE that's ok with you. It better be, because I'm in charge" as if I'd offered approval instead of confirmation.
If I have a question or have to inform her that a customer wants to speak to her, she ignores me. I can stand two feet away and say her name loudly, and she will pretend she did not hear. She's not very good at that. She has a visible "flinching" kind of response to my voice, in which she starts to turn in my direction but checks herself before she thinks she's given away that she's heard me. If I repeat the request or further attempt to get her attention, she'll busy herself to appear distracted.
Upon my third attempt, she will strike up a random, frivolous conversation with another nearby person in order to avoid answering me. Only when I go back and tell the customer that my boss is deliberately ignoring me does she acknowledge that she hears me, and of course she yells at me for saying that and tells me she didn't hear me before because she was "in a conversation." I have had several customers see this act, offer sympathy, and tell me they are surprised that she does not realize how transparent that behavior is.
She has also given me "orders" related to my private life (like where to shop and what to buy,) and has taken personal offense when I refused to follow them.
The two creepiest things she's done so far are the aforementioned staring, and the habit of only coming to my cash register when making purchases at our store on her way out or at lunch. She will wait in my line, even when the other working cashier is unoccupied, until it's blatantly and openly awkward for her to do so. She also crowds me behind the counter to do this, insisting on standing inches away from me. If I move away, she steps closer until there is no place further for me to move. This week, she's had me so creeped out that I am making mistakes at the register.
I've been documenting the harassment in a cheap little spiral notebook I keep in my pocket. She is angry about the notebook and has complained to her superior. She made sure I overheard her telling the co-manager (our P.C. term for assistant manager) that she was bringing him in to "discuss" it with me, meaning that they are going to badger me about it. I've contacted the human resources department over the harassment, but they have been no help. In fact, everything I discussed with H.R. was repeated back to my boss, so now she knows my complaints.
Everything that I've written here has been documented in detail, but I cannot share the details here at this time. However, I have shared all of that documentation with my case worker at the labor board. I do have hope that I will receive help with this situation from there. My biggest hope is that the company will transfer her to another store so she'll stop harassing me, and that they'll offer me enough of a settlement that I can at least undo the financial damage that two months of missed work did to my household. If I get enough, the crafting idea may not be such a bad thing. I make some pretty cool stuff. Maybe I will try to sell some of it on the side for extra cash.
In the meantime, the poop-throwing thing from the dream, I think is actually related to recent events. While I was gone, she told my neighbors who shop at that store that I had taken leave to recover from my injury. I've had to explain to a lot of them what really happened. Several are offended that she lied to them, and most are outraged at the treatment I received. She doesn't understand why they are less friendly with her than they used to be, and she's pissed off that they seem more friendly with me than they used to be. Her response to that has been behavior that has proved to be kind of off-putting to the people she's trying to persuade. Although the situation has been highly stressful to me, in the end, I do feel like I'm having a battle of wits with an unarmed person, and in the end I know that this is all temporary. I will survive it, and I will move on (we're leaving the area when the school year ends, hence the "someplace else to go" feeling in the dream) without having been defined by the attitude of a power-happy big fish in a little pond.
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