About six months before every move, without fail, the Packout Dreams start.

Surely, I am not the only one who has these? Basically, my subconscious comes up with every possible thing that could go wrong with a move and then runs it all as Technicolor movies while I sleep. It sounds like more fun than it actually is.

The odd thing is that I am not the most uptight person about my stuff. We don’t own very much that is very fragile or valuable. I’m not a “collector” of much of anything. We are always underweight with our household effects shipment (HHE). Way underweight.

We never even use the extra luggage allowance. I arrived in Vienna with one small rolling suitcase and a cat. I wore the same five outfits for a month. We really do believe in traveling light.

Or, at least I don’t think I am uptight about my stuff. Maybe I actually am! Or maybe I am just really bad with transitions.

Anyway, the latest dream involved my husband insisting on packing all of our audio-visual equipment in our luggage. TVs, stereo, speakers, you name it. Which, if you think about it, is not actually impossible.

Other scenarios my subconscious has sprung on me have included:

Chasing travel-crazed cats through airports.

Our shipment ending up in Australia instead of Austria. This could happen, you know. I bet it already has, to some unlucky family.

All our worldly goods sinking with a boat in the North Sea. I have mixed feelings about this particular scenario…

Finding a dead body when we unpack our HHE. I probably read too many murder mysteries. But it is not technically impossible that it could happen. I’m just saying.

Getting on a plane for a post I want to go to and landing up in a very different, and much less desirable, country. Surprise!

Maybe this is a mild form of PTSD. I hope that it is a healthy, if slightly weird, outlet for all the anxiety that moving can produce. It’s been going on for twenty-five years and about ten moves (the last time I counted on my fingers) so it seems that I am stuck with it, regardless.

That reminds me: time to get started on that inventory. If my stuff ends up sleeping with the fishes, I want to at least get some money for it.