Scavenger Nightmares and Dreams

[Grady]

I just woke up from 3 vivid dreams in a row about scavenging. this is my dream journal. Do you ever have crazy dreams like this?

The first dream started with these crazy pick up trucks pulling up to my house. They had cages on the back that were full of scrap materials and junk. These hillbilly looking folks got out and came up to the door and asked me if a couple had come to my yard sale and bought a specific item. I said yes and then the man said “that was my cousin” and him and the tall blond lady with the trucker hat started looking around my porch at the left over yard sale stuff.
“Are you looking for something specific?” I ask and then I go inside and grab some of my interesting Ebay items to see if I can make a sale. When I come out with my arms full I realize they have loaded a bunch of my stuff into their trucks.
Then I see the blond woman coming out of my house with two of my sons behind her and they are carrying our couch out of the house.
I realize whats up and yell “Everybody stop!”. My sons put down the couch. I go inside and come back out with a shotgun and the trucks and people are gone with my stuff.

I wake up. Realize it was a dream and go back to sleep. Immediately dream 2 starts.

I am at an estate sale. I have shown up late, which is bad and all the good stuff is gone. I’m walking through this old house and it is filthy. The carpets are dark and sticky. The blinds have thick greasy dust hanging off of them. There are cobwebs everywhere and it smells really bad. Each room I go into is full of junk. Finally I go into the last room and it has tables of interesting things, but everything is in a huge pile.

As I dig through it I Keep finding things I think have value but I don’t know what anything is. Makers marks I don’t recognize, boxes of old magazines I have never heard of.
Every time I go to look these things up on my phone they disappear and I never find them again.

Fade into dream number 3…

I am at a yard sale with my wife. The sale is by someone my wife used to work with who was totally incompetent at her job. It’s an old brick house in a rough neighborhood – classic Southside Tucson kind of street. We show up in this tiny hatchback hoopty-ride car. I look around at the things for sale and there is nothing that I want. My wife is talking to people she knows when the host says “there are tamales inside”.

I’m excited because tamales are a great traditional holiday food in Mexican culture and I have not had any tamales yet this year. I go inside the house and there is a potluck going on with lot’s of food to eat and big over weight people eating plates of food. I look all around and there are no tamales!

I go back outside and try to start our funky little car. When I turn turn the key I can hear the car struggling like the battery is almost dead. As I’m turning the key and pumping the gas pedal a homeless looking woman starts washing the windshield with a filthy rag and brown water in running down the glass. I can’t start the car.
I get out and go up to my wife on the porch as tell her the car won’t start and we need a jump. The homeless woman is vigorously washing the windshield. As I look out at the street scene I’m thinking to myself. “I can’t even find anything to sell at this yard sale and now this woman is going to want me to pay her for washing the windshield!”

Then my alarm goes off and I awake from this trifecta of scavenger anxiety. I wish I had some tamales to eat!

[Jo]

Wow, Grady, those were some crazy dreams! Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger, I think we all experience this scavenger anxiety to some extent.I woke up exhausted one morning because I had been endlessly packaging & shipping in my dreams. Mostly it happens when I start to feel that my business is controlling me and not the other way around. Sometimes when it’s happening a lot, I focus on what I can control and I try some positive scavenger visualization just before sleep. Cheesey I know, but it helps. I wish I had some tamales too!

[sonia]

Love the scavenger dreams! Sorry to hear about the anxiety. I recently had some scavenger dreams, too. The first one started out great. I found a house about a mile from my home in which the owner ran a little thrift shop, but with no signage out front. I was thrilled – a new place to scavenge with no competition! The problem was that when it was time to leave, I couldn’t leave somehow. I would say goodbye, and the lady thought I left, but I still kept looking all around her house. After a while I felt like an intruder, and tried to find a way to leave quietly without her noticing, but could never find a way out. And the whole time I was so excited to have find a good place to source that was so close to home.

The second dream I don’t remember much of, except that I was over to Jay and Ryanne’s house, and we were in their kitchen, which had a humongous island in it, about the size of two dining room tables.

[rescuedrelics]

I have relatives in Tucson whom I tried to get into reselling and have a cousin that goes to UofA. Told him I was jealous he could pick the dumpsters when all the kids leave, but unfortunately he has no interest.

Quite often my dreams revolve around making a sale or getting an email from an irate customer. A couple of times I dreamt I sold something and wake up to look at my phone to find it sold. Just woke up from a dream that I got this long email from a woman and she wanted to go on and on and lecture me about a sale (something that seems to happen every month) Seems she wanted someone to tell about her life in Vegas and something about grand kids in Louisiana, so random. I could hear Jay and Ryanne saying, “Don’t engage with the customer.” I had to see if I got such email. Luckily no.

[shortandstout]

I’d say most of my scavenger dreams revolve around the listing side. I have a long history of dreaming about a task I was focusing on intensely the day before, work or play. I think the bad dreams usually involve getting a huge batch of listings up to then see nothing uploaded or errors in everything. Ugh.

[Grady]

Thanks for sharing your dreams everyone! It’s interesting to see which parts of this business come into peoples psyche.

rescuedrelics – I have lived close to the UofA since highschool and remember being shocked when I was able to sell a few abandoned textbooks for $50. I dont’ dumpster dive much anymore, but I will still pull over frequently to check out piles of stuff left on the curb by ungrateful college kids!

[Linda Shields]

Grady, you might want to take some time out and re-center your personal and home life, including personal relationships. It sounds like things are getting out of hand. This could be causing your anxiety.

[Terri]

Don’t think I’ve ever had a scavenger dream. After reading all three of your dreams, I’d have to say that if they were mine, the nightmare part would’ve been the realization that the tamales were gone.

[TiffanyT]

I don’t recall any scavenger dreams. What does come to mind as I read your dream #2 is that maybe it is good to just get the stuff even though you don’t recognize the marks or names, without taking the time to check on your phone. Take a chance if it looks interesting to you and trust that it’s going to turn out OK, you will be OK either way.

[Author]

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