Mundane dream about work turns into a nightmare.

Feel free to read this on the pod. First time caller, long time listener of the pod, and devout follower of the Cult of the Space Butterfly, may its wings flap eternally as it dreams the world, with a dream for the great Coxstradamus. In the dream, I am at work (I work in a grocery store and start my day before the store is open), walking around and talking to people I work with about work things. While the setting was my job, everything was slightly off, like this one room/area was in the right place, but it was set up slightly different enough that I noticed, but was still able to “walk” through it like normal. I know the dream is set on a Friday, because a specific coworker comes in early on fridays, and we were talking about him when he showed up and I walked away with him and “talked”, I can’t remember if we talked about anything specifically or if there was no words exchanged and we just moved through the dream in a conversing manner. After we talked and I moved on, I went to wash my hands, and as I was drying them, an old lady came up and commented on how thoroughly I was drying my hands. I was methodically drying each finger by wrapping the paper towel around it and pulling it away slowly. I told the lady an anecdote that I would have come up with in the waking world so what I would say, I could tell that my Autism had spiked when talking. I told her I dry my hands like this cause I remember watching an episode of ER when I was a kid, my mom watched it all the time, where it was a flashback episode of one doctor training another doctor and the trainer played a prank on the new guy by telling him he has to be very detailed when washing his hands, counting the number of times you scrub you fingers level of detailed, and I just picked up the methodic drying from that show. This is the point that the dream starts to devolve into a nightmare that I would eventually snap awake from and be too freaked out over to go back to sleep and end up in front of my PC typing this out at midnight. As I was drying my hands, I noticed a healed scab on my left middle finger and picked at it with my left thumb and pulled it away, revealing a bunch of short thick as beard hair strands coming out of the spot the scab was. The old lady takes my hand and looks at the hairs and says it's a snail in my finger and tries to pull it out by the strands. It didn’t budge, and I walked away from her, playing with the hairs and looking at them, when I came upon a political news podcaster I recently started to consume more content from, and asked her to look at it. She asks me why, and I state with confidence that she is my doctor and it is her job. I will add that I am in the process of getting a new GP and got a phone call from their office yesterday, needing to reschedule my new patient appointment as the doctor will be out of the office on the original appointment day. As the podcaster, now my doctor apparently, looked at the hairs, they changed into what I would describe as a quarter toy machine quality hermit crab, but in a normal snail’s shell. I ask how a snail egg could have gotten into my finger as she digs it out, revealing a raw skin pink hole in my finger. This is the point I snapped awake and eventually gave up on trying to go back to sleep. I should add that I’m on a week-long vacation from work, didn’t go anywhere, just took some time off from work and start work again in a day.

No idea what this dream turned nightmare means, and I'm honestly kind of annoyed that it went from a dream to a nightmare. I needed to get back into a normal sleep schedule, and now that I’m awake two hours earlier than normal, I guess I’ll finally give Mewgenics a go.