Full disclosure: I am on Chantix, and it's awesome. It's reducing my tobacco cravings. And it gives me weird dreams. The good kind of weird.
I am a child welfare worker and this was a dream about child welfare. Sort of.
Let me start at the beginning.
Real life context: before you can get cases in Philadelphia's partially privatized (thanks, neoliberals!) child welfare system, there is a 3-month training.
In my dream, during my training, I shadowed another child welfare worker on a visit to a family in need. The family consisted of three children, a boy of about 12 years old, and his two little sisters. There were two parents, who were both dying (I am not sure what was killing them but it was sort of disease), and had also been laid off from their jobs. The family needed help and my agency was working with them to secure permanency for the kids after the parents were gone.
They lived in a building near where I grew up, that was like a mall, with a shopping concourse, but it also had low-rent apartments. This building had a number of elevators, as well as a bank of huge slides from the top floor all the way down, with airport-level security just to use the slides.
By coincidence, several months later, I moved into this same building with a big-hearted but naïve yuppie roommate whose mother was a fading starlet of a bohemian artist, who lived in a retirement complex nearby, that was full of aging bohemians. I liked her, we got along very well, and became friends.
To help pay the rent, my friend Stephan and I bought a big blue truck and sold Captain Picard merchandise like commemorative plates and coffee mugs outside the building. For some reason, Stephan had to leave, and I needed to go upstairs, so we left the truck unattended. While I was upstairs in my apartment, I saw through the window that the three children from the distressed family (who were now my neighbors) were stealing my truck!
My side business impacted, I went to confront the children's parents, hoping they would remember me, but I encountered another child welfare worker who was frustrated because no one would answer the door. I don't remember the next part of the dream, but somehow I found myself inside the apartment, where I learned that the parents had died, and the children were left on their own. They were living in filth and eating only candy. The 12-year old boy was trying to take care of his younger sisters, but they were running out of money, and he had marked the days left on their calendar until he planned to join the Army with a fake ID to support his family. I immediately filed a report on the situation and the children were taken into DHS custody.
Then, my big-hearted but naïve yuppie roommate decided he wanted to adopt the kids, but I felt the kids needed to be in a more therapeutic environment than the apartment of two bachelors. I wanted them to go to a therapeutic foster home. But my yuppie roommate couldn't separate his compassion from his ego, so I visited his mother in the retirement complex nearby to ask her to convince her son to let us do what was best for the kids. I also didn't want them in my home because they stole my truck and sold it, along with all the Captain Picard merchandise that was helping to pay my rent.
Then, it turned out that one of the names on the report was confused with a similarly named celebrity, and DHS accused me of "bad faith reporting." But I pointed out that only the person's last name was the same, and the report was validated. Then, I went through security and was allowed to use the slide.
That's when the dream ended.
Yes, I am in therapy.