A nightmare
One of the things that I do that is fairly weird is I put cash away for specific purposes. It's the old-fashioned "envelope method", and it works for me. So it isn't abnormal for me to have a $50 or $100 bill that is designated for "entertainment" or "vacation" or whatever. This is by way of explanation for how something played out in a dream I had the other day.
Small Boy and I had gone to a museum. In dream logic, it made perfect sense that we didn't have to pay until we were leaving. At that point we were at a cash register in front of a cafe, sort of like a starbucks with cake on display, etc, and there was an eat-in seating area associated with this. But we weren't having scones and tea or anything, we were just paying for our museum tickets and then going to lunch.
But when I paid for the tickets the price was a lot higher than I expected, something odd like $19.43 each. Ouch. I had a $50 bill that was supposed to be the museum AND lunch. So I hand over the $50 bill and get $1 back in change. Huh? I asked what they charged me. Somehow they'd charged me for 3 pieces of cake that the person next to me had ordered. Wait, I said, I didn't have the cake. The clerk blinked at me; the cake had been disbursed. Wasn't her fault if the wrong person paid. The person who got the cake heard all this and happily skipped off, having gotten free cake. I asked for a refund. The clerk asked me to ask the person sitting there eating cake for the money. The person eating the cake clearly had no intention of paying some beggar $9. They had free cake. Joke's on me.
So, instead of having (the planned for and saved for) lunch with my son, I paid for someone else's cake and we went hungry.
This dream was entirely about my anxieties about being a landlord. We are having an awful time trying to fill the empty apartment. I have had something like twenty people call. They jerk me around about times to see the place. Their references aren't reachable. The ones I approve end up not taking the apartment. There's an onslaught of people who absolutely cannot afford to pay me, but they're quite content to let me house them anyway. I have this building budgeted so tightly, and have so little time for this bullshit. It is literally giving me nightmares.
Small Boy and I had gone to a museum. In dream logic, it made perfect sense that we didn't have to pay until we were leaving. At that point we were at a cash register in front of a cafe, sort of like a starbucks with cake on display, etc, and there was an eat-in seating area associated with this. But we weren't having scones and tea or anything, we were just paying for our museum tickets and then going to lunch.
But when I paid for the tickets the price was a lot higher than I expected, something odd like $19.43 each. Ouch. I had a $50 bill that was supposed to be the museum AND lunch. So I hand over the $50 bill and get $1 back in change. Huh? I asked what they charged me. Somehow they'd charged me for 3 pieces of cake that the person next to me had ordered. Wait, I said, I didn't have the cake. The clerk blinked at me; the cake had been disbursed. Wasn't her fault if the wrong person paid. The person who got the cake heard all this and happily skipped off, having gotten free cake. I asked for a refund. The clerk asked me to ask the person sitting there eating cake for the money. The person eating the cake clearly had no intention of paying some beggar $9. They had free cake. Joke's on me.
So, instead of having (the planned for and saved for) lunch with my son, I paid for someone else's cake and we went hungry.
This dream was entirely about my anxieties about being a landlord. We are having an awful time trying to fill the empty apartment. I have had something like twenty people call. They jerk me around about times to see the place. Their references aren't reachable. The ones I approve end up not taking the apartment. There's an onslaught of people who absolutely cannot afford to pay me, but they're quite content to let me house them anyway. I have this building budgeted so tightly, and have so little time for this bullshit. It is literally giving me nightmares.