Signs of a Nervous Breakdown??

Merriam Webster's Medical Dictionary defines a nervous breakdown as the following:

Main Entry: nervous breakdown
Function: noun
: an attack of mental or emotional disorder especially when of sufficient severity to require hospitalization

There is nothing in the definition about dreams. I've never been a big dreamer, but the last two days (when my stress has peaked) my dreaming has become vivid.

Wednesday night dream....

Frankie (who I work with) was living at my house too...and she was upstairs in the bathroom. I knew that there had been a serial killer out looking for me. I was upstairs as well and I walk down stairs and look at the front door (when you are at the front door in my house you can see all the way up the stairs). I'm standing at the front door and it is slightly ajar. I yell up to Frankie to see if she left the door open. She comes to the top of the steps and says no. As she's saying no, I feel a pinch on my arm as I'm being stuck with a needle. Then I wake up. Wonder if its significant that Frankie works in the health office...

Thursday night dreams....

First dream. I'm back working in TV news again and I'm somewhere away from the station. For some reason I have to do the sports segment of the news. Someone there gives me a sheet of paper with things to read off of it, it isn't a script though. The same person also gives me a jar (one of the big tall plastic ones) and tells me that I need to read the story off of that as well. I am then immediately live on air. I read the first story and then am supposed to read off of the jar but I don't know what part of it to read, so I whisper to the person who gave me the jar asking what I need to read and there is dead air and some whispering. I then try to read everything and it leads to a bunch of ahh...umm's and then It's over.

Second dream. I'm at a beach somewhere out of the country (which should really be a plus!) and I'm in some sort of beach house. The beach house is just like a cement box with some small windows up high and a big sliding door on the front of the house looking at the beach. I'm there with a local kid. On the way in I'm told that this is a dangerous area and that there are gangs there. I still go and am in the house with the kid and a bunch of local gang members come by and are walking all around the house. They go away and I end up walking down to the beach. I see a local woman and her child and she tells me not to stay there because it is dangerous and they will kill me. I leave and walk back up to the beach house and am putting my things next to the door of the house. The gang members come back up and are knocking on the door of the house and looking in the glass sliding door. They start trying to break the glass and one of them opens the other door to the house. I grab the phone and dial 911 and tell them to take anything they want. They grab my laptop and I'm yelling at the police on the phone to come and help me. I tell them the area where I am and they say that it is a dangerous area and I should never have gone there...they say they are sending someone and then a gang member takes the phone out of my hand and I wake up.

Scary dreams.

While the dreams might not signal a nervous breakdown, they are definately indicative of stress and the lack of control I have over my situation.

I spoke with my advisor on wednesday who told me that it will be impossible for me to graduate in 2 years while going to school. In fact, he steared me away from taking 2 classes. Good news, bad news, I'm not sure. I had really wanted to graduate in 2 years. He told me that I'd be lucky to do it in 3 years while working full time. On the bright side, that takes some of the pressure off. He also told me that I was currently signed up for the 2 hardest classes in the program (why he would sign me up for those my first semester while he knew I was working full time I don't know.) This information, along with my lack of any time to do anything other than study, sleep and work, has lead me to the decision to drop one of my classes. I barely have the time to get the reading done, let alone a 20 page paper in that class, along with all the other papers I have in other classes. So, this will leave me with 1 three credit class and 1 one credit class. I'm now in the process of dropping the class.

Feeling kinda like a failure for having to drop though...

Oh and apologies to my teachers for not citing my source in APA format...