Despite the fact that I've gotten 6 hours of sleep in the past 48 hours, and noding this is coming out of my sleep time (this dream woke me up at 6 in the morning, and I don't actually have to be up until 8), I had to get this down. I was scared that I'd forget it if I didn't write it immediately.
My laundry room is approximately 1.5m X 3m. Or, for those of you who think in imperial, 5 X 10.
It is a cramped, messy sort of room, with a washing machine and drier, a dishwasher that we don't use (it isn't even plugged in, the real dishwasher is in the kitchen. We don't even know if this one works anymore) and dusty unfinished hardwood shelves filled with obscure tools and other random objects, most of which no one ever uses anyway. The floor is littered with empty plastic and glass bottles, which someone is supposed to get around to recycling (no home pickup of stuff to be recycled, here), but it is unclear to whom this task should fall, and in any case no one does it. Additionally, my overworked older sister keeps on dumping her hamper in there, which is pretty unfair, since it makes it hard to move around. Maybe she thinks that if she physically puts her laundry within a few feet of the washing machine, she's more likely to get around to doing it. Or maybe that the laundry will magically wash itself. I don't know. As though it wasn't hard enough without her stinking laundry basket taking up half the available space.
In any case, in my dream, I'm standing in the laundry room.
Here's where it gets weird. There is a small, rusty sink on top of the defunct dishwasher, and a stove on top of the washing machine, where the drier normally is. In reality, we don't have a sink in the laundry room, let alone a stove. In any case, as it turns out, I'm running a burger joint out of my laundry room. People crowd outside of the open door, shouting their orders at me. It is hard, working in the tiny room, when 20 different people are asking me where their burger is and telling me that it should have been ready by now. What's worse, my parents are in the already-cramped room with me. My father is standing by the stove, cooking something or other, and my stepmother is trying to make sage tea.
These are both fairly normal activities for them. The question is why they are doing these domestic activities in MY laundry room, which is adjacent to the kitchen, when I obviously need the space for MY burger joint.
For some reason, moving my business to the kitchen is not an option. It seemed like maybe, in the dream, we didn't have a stove and a sink in the kitchen, just in the laundry room. Or maybe we didn't have a kitchen. I don't know.
Things get particularly tense when one of my customers, a teenage boy, 15 or 16 years old with an innocent face and pretty blue eyes, holds out a coffee mug half filled with black coffee (Turns out I serve hot beverages too) and tells me that the coffee is too strong. He politely requests that I add hot water to his cup. I try to do this, but the kettle is full of brown water and dead leaves, and my stepmother won't let me use the sink. Even if I had a kettle and clean water, my father is using the stove.
Then my parents disappear, as does the boy who wanted hot water for his coffee, and all of a sudden my little sister appears and decides that she MUST do laundry, right now, and kicks me out of the laundry room, saying that I can finish the burgers after she's done. I complain, saying that I'll lose my customers and that she'll drive me out of business, but my pleas fall on deaf ears. So I'm waiting impatiently outside of the laundry room, alone, because for some reason all of my customers have disappeared. I continue arguing with my little sister, but she has the upper hand and knows it.
By the time she's done, it's too late. My customers have shuffled off (probably to McDonald's), and I'm left alone in the cluttered little room.
I think that this is my subconscious' way of telling me that I should get off my ass and go do some laundry.