I have a recurring dream about having to go on the air and the board morphs into something I have never seen before; an unrecognizable mess of lit up buttons, weird slider pots and computer screens that make no sense. There is no time to get familiar with them, either. All of the live copy is comprised of coupons, mostly from Fred Meyer, and are all tacked together with staples around their outside edges. It makes it difficult to read the next coupon underneath as I try pull the staples apart to read them on the air.

I have had the dream for years. I wake up with the feeling of being unprepared. YIKES!

Does anyone else have similar stuff that is anxiety producing or otherwise confounding to you?

Or should I just get some heavy drugs or even shock treatment?

Have occasional dreams of record running out and can't find next song to cue up thus impending DEAD AIR BAD DREAM! Am I dated or what.

Lee Mirabal was the first person from whom I heard a description of the dead air dream. In hers, a record is about to finish playing, and there is nothing to put on after it. The "k-kshhhh....k-kshhhh" sound ends up going out over the air at the end of the record.

Similar dreams that I have had involve CDs. The CD that is playing is about to end, and there is nothing else to put on after it. Apparently, in these anxiety dreams, one can't just open the mic and be creative.

The more updated dead air dreams have been the automation computer crashing...the curser froze and when the song/spot ends.........I wake up!

It's nice to know we are not alone. I had one just last night. Saw staff members from my Portland days circa 1996 in the same dream with a boss I had last year here in Washington DC. The REM stage merging staffs from different markets and different decades. Crazy. I've have the "dead-air" dreams for years. When I stepped away from daily live air-work and was just doing production they subsided. Then once voice tracking was added to my duties, the dreams/nightmares came back. If only Freud was around with a call-in show.

I think those kind of dreams reveal a deep seated psychological condition found mainly in old d.j.'s who equate the record running out with their own mortality. Anyway, that's what Dr. Phil told me.

Sounds like dead-air dreams are very similar to I'm-behind-deadline-finishing-this-newspaper-page-layout dreams.

Having done newspaper work for 30 years, I've had a LOT of those....

I mentioned this on another post once. I have 3 or so of these a year. It is always something about being in a totally analog control room , Collins/Rockwell type board, Denon CD players, ITC tri-decks and a turntable or two. Doing a show and then being distracted by something or go into another dream and get panicky because I have a break to do back in the other dream or a 'seg' to hit or whatever. Then I try to get back into the radio dream to fix whatever it was I forgot to do. Sometimes in the dream I even forget what it was I was supposed to do exactly and then get real mad and wake up agitated.

You dream mostly with your right hemisphere, the creative side, and very little with the left or logical part. This explains a lot about why we dont do very well at the fine details when dreaming.

Larbear put fingers to keyboard and entered~
"I think those kind of dreams reveal a deep seated psychological condition found mainly in old d.j.'s who equate the record running out with their own mortality."

"Softly As I Leave You" perhaps? Or something like that, anyways???........... ;o)

Softly (as I leave you)....that song WAS played by an overnight DJ, Mike Roberts, as he ended his life on a copper feedline in the transmitter room @ 1520/KYXI around 1972 or so.

Kennewickman,

You are correct. He hung himself November 9, 1972.

It sounds like the dreams reported here are all about not being competent and failing to meet outside demands of the workplace. Perfectionism has shown its self with each recollection. Perfectionism is the result of not feeling secure in one's self. Its the result of lack of early attachment to parental figures; feeling isolated and uncared for. If you are on the radio, everyone will care about you. The world hangs on each word. Then reality hits that nobody is listening and no one cares. Radio has betrayed you, again.

It means that wackos dot the radio industry. I also contend that this is a theme that may be contained in other careers, as well.

Where's Dr. Joy Brown when we need her?

For years after I left the business (or did it leave me?), I had the dead air dreams. Record runs out, nothing on the other turntable, locked out of studio watching record run out, opening mouth no sound comes out, starting table but it doesn't move, etc, etc, etc.

Arrrrrrrrgh! It's scaring me again! Make it stop!

I'm in the control room, live on the air, the song is within one minute from ending... and I can not find another song to play!

My version of this dream has been popping up for decades, it never involves the song actually ending, just the surprise of not being able to find another song to get ready to play, next!

dream to have non competes go bye bye bye!! I know someone who used to work for Horizon Brodcasting Group in bend for several years. One day he was let go due to the "company going in a different direction". I know someone who wanted to hire this person two or three times in the past year,,his ex boss put the kabash on the local opportunities,,he wanted a bunch of cash to not enforce the non compete. Yet another former HBG employee was let go last month, has a non compete and the boss man chose not to enforce his. Doesn't seem fair. I know this person and a couple of others are privy to some, lets just say some nastiness going on, on the LSM's computer(consideration must have been for him to keep his mouth shut about the incident and the non compete will not be enforced) !! shame, shame, shame!! The word is getting out on the matter,,it will be clear very soon!!

Ya, that song running out is familiar. It actually happened to me from time to time, as you got behind sometimes just because you might have been doing a phone bit or filling out the ARB playlist log or running around trying to get your tape change done on the automated AM station !

It wasnt perfectionism, Radiohead. It was just the way the system worked back then, and if you didnt do your job, the station sounded like 'caca'. Ergo, you sounded like 'caca'..

As a news person, my dreams (or nightmares) involved not having enough copy to fill the break or not being able to read for some reason -- in one dream the news copy was written on toilet paper and I could't make out what it said.

How about actual dead air occurances?

Late night jock accidently locks studio door etc......

I remember Hal Owen (KYTE/KYXI..) talking about a California station with studios at the tower site in the country....working evenings and having a horse or cow wander into the open lobby (summer and no AC!)...animal blocked him from getting back to the on air booth....so pushing the animal out of the way while listening to dead air....lol.

I think that Kennewickman's comment about dreaming occurring in the right hemisphere is interesting because I have always found it difficult or impossible to read text in my dreams.

All of the radio nightmares that I have had take place in the WITR control room, as it was set up in the mid 1990s. The board was an AudioArts analog console. There were three CD players and two turntables. The station had a format rule that no artist that had been played during the previous two hours could be played. The airshifts were typically two hours in duration.

In the dream, one of the CD players is playing a song that is about to end. Everything in the control room has already been played, and there is not enough time to be able to go to the record library, find something, and get it cued up to go on the air.

I haven't had the DJ dream in a while, but the "I didn't graduate from school" dream seems to haunt me every now and then. In that one, I find out that the registrar's office either at my college or high school just discovered that I was a few credits short of qualifying for a diploma, years after receiving it. I soon find myself sitting in a classroom with teenagers and struggling to remember locker combinations or having to move back to Rochester, NY (RIT) and then going through a big ordeal to find my dorm room or to get the keys to it. Sometimes the school dreams come with the added twist that it is the first day of classes, and I can't find my schedule, so I don't know where to go. In the college version, sometimes I am near the end of the quarter, and I discover that I had registered for a class and then forgotten about it; thus, I have missed every lecture and every exam for that class and am destined to fail!

I wonder whether these school dreams might have been inspired by an episode of _Married_With_Children_ where Peg Bundy discovers, as an adult, that she didn't graduate high school because she failed Home Ec.

The school dreams are common, from what I have read about it. Supposedly those occur when you are having issues with something in your life regarding an insecurity or self doubt about your capabilities.

The dream interpretation " experts " say it often comes up if you are learning a new job or in a new relationship where you subconsciencely believe you might be 'over your head".

Ya, I have had those where I signed up for some courses , then blew them off, and was sitting in a final exam totally clueless.

In one of mine I have perfectly backtimed, as usual, to the top of the hour network news. Song ends, I legal ID and time check as the second hand sweeps 12 and I pot it up. ONE MINUTE EARLY! Nothing prepared to say, just a rambling fill about what I think I'll be doing for you in the next hour. Luckily I always panic wake before the minute is over.

I had a dream once where the studio MIC suddenly became a living thing and it tried to BITE me...

..grew beadie little eyes, sharp teeth and growled - too weird...

fortunately, we can't recall how dreams SMELL!

"dream to have non competes go bye bye bye!! I know someone who used to work for Horizon Brodcasting Group in bend for several years. One day he was let go due to the "company going in a different direction". I know someone who wanted to hire this person two or three times in the past year,,his ex boss put the kabash on the local opportunities,,he wanted a bunch of cash to not enforce the non compete. Yet another former HBG employee was let go last month, has a non compete and the boss man chose not to enforce his. Doesn't seem fair. I know this person and a couple of others are privy to some, lets just say some nastiness going on, on the LSM's computer(consideration must have been for him to keep his mouth shut about the incident and the non compete will not be enforced) !! shame, shame, shame!! The word is getting out on the matter,,it will be clear very soon!!"

So, madman, you log on, create an account, and so far two posts, both direct attacks on a person who is highly reputable and one of the kindest most fair men I know.
So, what STUPID thing did you do to get fired???
Try to be a SUPERSTAR on a TEAM?
Get a lawyer if you think you've been wronged, but don't air your dirty boxers on a message board ok?

I didn't have to dream any of these things; they all actually happened. All. With the possible exception of the bug-eyed, biting microphone, although I think that did happen once at KQIV.

There is a funny old song, country tune...

BJ the DJ...I think it was done by Lefty Frizzel and others...Stonewall Jackson also, written by Kitty Wells...

About a young DJ always rushing to work to turn on the radio station..then one morning his mother didnt hear the station on the air and called the cops and they found BJ the DJ off the road dead in a wrecked car....with dead air on the local radio station...

Maybe, you had to be there.

I had never heard it before. I found it one day while driving a road trip to Seattle, a track I had never listened to on a CD compilation I bought about 5 years ago.

In my impending dead air dream, the medium was carts. My song was ending and I was looking all over the studio, which had cart racks mounted on the walls, yet I couldn't find anything to play. I always woke up before the song ended though.

School dream: forget where or when the class is, can't attend, so I flunk it.

Dead air dream: was vinyl LPs, now it's CDs, and I haven't even board op'd since '93.

Current dream: need to fix a medium-sized, very old, open-frame tube transmitter. No idea where to start. A first-few-months-on-the-job dream for engineers.