In which she admits to a new recurring dream

There was the tide-coming-in dream, for when I was worried about deadlines, and there was the packing-anxiety dream, for when I was thinking of travelling somewhere that would require packing. (Actually travelling there was unnecessary: being homesick sufficed.) These have both trailed off because I rarely have deadlines these days and no longer travel much.

What I do do is work at the library until closing time on a Wednesday evening. Enter the library-closing-anxiety dream.

Basic plot: It's 9pm. I want to close the library and go home. But the students won't leave! Worse than that, they keep coming in!

Variations and elaborations:

• The first time I had this dream, the students were making sandwiches in a discussion room.
• The second-most-recent time, we were actually opening the library but the students were coming in before they were ready, and also our lending desk had been renovated into oblivion and the students kept coming into the staff-only area to take books off the shelves.
• Last night the students (instead of being merely oblivious to closing time as normal) actually had a reason for not leaving, to wit, they had assignments/exams the next morning, needed a place to study, and didn't see why I couldn't just go home and leave them in the building. They even went into the floors where we'd turned off the lights, apparently intending to study by streetlight or something. At 9:12 I decided to call Security but I kept losing my place in the list of phone numbers, and then when I found it, it was some formula that required multiplying one of the digits and I couldn't tell if I was meant to carry the one onto the next digit or just forget it.

I actually have an obscure fondness for the tide-coming-in-and-going-to-drown-me dreams, and the packing-anxiety dreams at least mean that yay, I'm travelling somewhere! But library-closing-anxiety dreams? Just Plain Annoying.

[I just arrived at work and asked my colleagues if they ever get this dream. "Every Sunday," says the one who closes on Sundays. "Every Tuesday," says the one who closes Tuesdays. Somehow I feel both reassured and depressed by the inevitability of it all.]