Even though it’s been six years since I worked there I still dream about being a courier at Fedex. Some jobs get in your head. I don’t know if I still dream because I worked there for five years or because of the repetitive, routinized, physical nature of the work. The dreams are absurd. The most common theme is that even though I haven’t been around, my route has been waiting for me and no one really noticed that I wasn’t doing it. I’ll walk into the warehouse and there’s a truck waiting with my clipboard and crates, ready to hit the road. Everyone else is bustling around the warehouse as usual. Last night, there was a new wrinkle, my file in the check-in room was full of uncashed checks.
Even when I worked there I dreamt about it. My most common dreams involved entering an intersection and seeing Fedex packages all over the road as if spilled out of the back. Other times, I would move in my sleep as if I were picking up boxes.
Maybe our brains are designed to adapt to such situations, slowly shaping our minds to meet the physical, mental demands of our day to day activities until we become optimized for our work, in my case, as a courier. When you do physical labor and grow familiar with it, you can achieve a zen-like state of mindlessness where your subconscious mind operates your body. Maybe dreams are just the residue of these orphaned mental routines.