Sleep, but Never Rest

In waking life, a coworker recently died of a heart attack. This turned into a dream that combined with some episode of “The Office.”

It was when Steve Carrell (sp?) was still the manager and his character Michael was being over dramatic about the passing of the coworker. He threw away his mail saying, “What’s the point?”

Some of the mail was a large USPS envelope. The character Jim was in the manager’s office as well. I said, “Could I open your mail then?” Jim said it was trash once he threw it away.

I grabbed the mail and opened the USPS envelope first. It was a large stack of small postcards and notes - most from the head office and some from Channel 6 Good Morning Columbus TV show. I even got the commercial jingle in my head while looking at the front of the cards. The postcards were oxidized, even though they were only a few months old. (I sell century-old postcards in waking life.) I told them, “I love old postcards!”

One of the head office notes talked about congratulating our department with free pie. I remembered in the dream Michael coming in with pie randomly, not knowing why.

There were letters from Channel 6 telling the now dead coworker to get well soon. I was impressed that a news station did that kind of outreach.

Later, I found a scrapbook that belonged to the dead coworker. It had some red pages, but was partly filled with doodles of pomegranates (pomegranates represent life after death or the afterlife in my symbology). I drew an image of a pomegranate in his sketchbook as an acknowledgement / sign of respect.

Later, I found another sketchbook - this one was all red. There were more doodles of pomegranates. I told the character, Pam, about my idea about having everyone draw a pomegranate and sign and date it as a “remembrance” idea.

I flipped to the end because I felt I was waking up and flipped backward through the sketchbook. The coworker had drawn storyboards for a cartoon where the main character was an elephant (in a button up shirt) who worked in an office and dreamed of retirement (chilling on a lawn chair on the beach in swim trunks, holding a martini with an olive). It ended abruptly when the sketchbook ran out of pages.

My coworker was only a couple of years away from retirement.

Elephants generally symbolize “always remember.”

So I remember being in some office area/lobby in a tall office building. My mom was visiting and Charlie-Alpha* walks in. My mom invited him because she thought he was good looking and wanted us to meet.

I told her we already knew each other, we just haven’t seen each other in person in over a decade, and it would have been nice to have a heads up because I was drenched in sweat and would have liked to take a shower first (I was just complaining about this in waking life).

I talked with Charlie and found out random details like that he works at White Castle and had a girlfriend in New York who was dating someone else (that part was weird because he didn’t seem like the type to date a girl who was dating someone else).

I went to take a shower in another part of the building because I thought it would be weird that I’d want a shower to see some guy I used to know but not for my job?

As I walked down the windowless hall with brown carpet, I noticed a plaque on the wall with some slogan like, “15 hamburgers, 15 sec., for 15 cents.” I remembered in the dream someone on Reddit saying that after the costs of creating the food is taken out, the burger is still 15 cents or something like that.

So I found after getting ready to shower that the door to the showering area happen to have a window. I was frustrated, but my mom yelled down the hall that that was what the “door fees” were for. My mom makes the strangest, but funny jokes.

* Names have been changed.

The first dream I remember is watching what I thought was going to be new Oz movie, but it ended up being some anime version that just got really ridiculous at the end.

I was there with my parents and my godfather in this large auditorium with comfy seats and an aisle of stars down the middle. Instead of projecting the movie in front of us on the IMAX-sized screen, they projected it on the wall to the left and it was smaller than a normal movie theater screen. There was a part of the wall at jutted out, so the screen was partially distorted on the right. The main screen was covered with 4’ x 4’ sheets of paper in a grid pattern.

I got bored with the movie and went up one level and laid down on some seats and watched the movies past my feet. I looked around and realized most of the audience were guys around my age from all over the “nerd scale” (including some hot nerds).

When the movie ended, the lights came one and all the guys left at once. The lights went down a little later when I was about to leave and one guy (not quite “hot,” but not ugly) kept asking me if I had an Xbox something or other. It took me three times to understand him and I assumed he asked if I had an Xbox username. I told him I only have a PS3.

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This turned into a scene were I was interviewing for some job. I was in a tiny cramped office with a table that was cluttered and way too big for the room. There was only one incandescent light, but it lit the room OK, I guess.

The person interviewing me was an overweight black woman in a nice patterned blouse. She looked tired as if she was stressed and had a long day. She looked like someone I might have met before (maybe the interviewer for a job back in 2010). She asked me the normal “what are your strengths” type questions and I don’t remember what I answered, but they didn’t look like they impressed her nor did they appear to hurt my chances.

Then, she asked what I thought about the two (or three?) captured people. I told her I wasn’t sure what she was talking about. She explained that the night before, these people were captured from a boat or something and are being held somewhere.

I told her that I didn’t know enough about the story because I was at the movies the night before. She explained the people were related to her and the place they were holding them was closed, but she was worried they might be getting tortured or something.

I told her I was sorry about the situation and that she should be the first visitor when it opens tomorrow morning. Maybe camp out or something. I wondered if I should have been more emotionally affected by this and wondered if I should fake cry. I didn’t know these people, but was she expecting me to become upset with the situation?

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I remember leaving the building the interview was taking place in and ending up across the street. I remember trying to get back across the street, but I was crawling on the ground. The traffic picked up so I had to crawl and keep from being hit. I was successful. The sun went down.

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This merged into a dream (same time, continuous) where I was being trained by some other employees at some place I was just hired and it was led by a girl a little younger than me with light hair and a nice-looking guy with dark brown hair around my age. I think there was another guy, but he arrived later and had lighter brown hair and a less confident stature. He reminded me of Stephen*. Everyone was in dark blue uniforms.

We came along what looked like a vault half covered by a red brick wall. Some of us had flashlights and the girl asked me if I remember this. I said I remembered the vault door wasn’t real and the brick was fake, too. The girl moved the brick to the left to uncover the vault door, but pushed on the left brick wall and the whole wall and vault opened out toward us.

We stepped over what looked like daisy-changed car batteries on the ground into a cement room. There was a keypad on the wall, mounted in a white plastic mounting. The guy served partly as a lookout and the girl started trying to hack into the keypad to open the real vault. The red digital numbers above the keypad started counting down from either 3 or 2:30, beeping with every second. Supposedly, the “batteries” were bombs in disguise and we had to stop the count down to keep them from blowing. I wasn’t afraid at all because the girl was fantastic at her job. She stopped it with more than a minute to spare.

I don’t remember what was in the vault, but I remember moving on to another vault.

Even before we opened the door, I said, “I think I hear something beeping…” We opened the door to find about 38 seconds left on the timer and was counting down. As we stepped over the bombs, I thought that there is no way she can stop the counter and maybe we should disarm the bombs. She fearlessly started working on the timer. The guys looked less relaxed, but not scared.

I got nervous and said, “You know what, I’m going to leave before these blow…”

I ran across the now empty street to a yellowish/tan brick building. I don’t know why I went in there, since the wall facing the vault had a HUGE window and auditorium seating facing it. This auditorium had aisles up the sides with short steps mixed in with inclined paths. The carpet was a saffron/tan color.

I ran pass the window and up the left side of the seats  to the back. I thought I’d drop if I saw the fire, otherwise, maybe the girl was able to stop the timer.

I remember seeing a fiery glow on the buildings and street signs outside the window. Then the big window shattered outward to the street and random papers and trash from the seats blew toward the street. My ears popped and I dropped to the ground.

I watched as the explosion didn’t look like an explosion, but like a fiery liquid that went in a straight line from the window opening to the back of the auditorium. It was hot, but not fire-hot, and it didn’t flow down onto me in the aisle.

The girl and the two guys jumped over me just then and landed and rolled. They were enjoying this whole thing. They appeared to be on fire, but not burning. It was as if they had a clear protective liquid around them and it was on fire, not them. The protective liquid clung to them like water does in zero-gravity (like that video of a wet rag being rung out on the space station). After the fires died down, I got up and the girl and guys were laughing from the excitement. I was saying how I was worried about dying and one of them pat me on the shoulder and playfully shook me to calm me down and said they had a solution for that. That’s why they didn’t mind the danger. I thought they meant cloning at the time (a subplot of a story idea I had), but I think it was really referencing dying in a dream.

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This merged into a dream were I was back in the big movie theater (probably because I was trying to remember my dream while dreaming to write this now).

My “mom” (now played by someone else) wanted to leave and so did I (I was partly another character), but my dad (played by another character and became a “step-dad” character with other children) stayed playing with some old-school video game with some of the guys that were trickling out from the movie.

I had a board game in my hands to carry out with us.

The step-dad character gave me the old-school video game so I could see what was so entertaining. It was shaped like an etch-a-sketch and the moving images looked like an etch-a-sketch mixed with an old dot matrix Nintendo Game-boy. I thought it was neat, but wasn’t overly impressed. I thought it was funny how the strangers really liked it, but then remembered most people my age still like old school video games, so that made the guys my age. If they were younger, they’d probably think the graphics were horrible.

We eventually left and this building was weird. We couldn’t just leave out the first door, we had to go through the building up and down stairs and ladders, etc.

We got to part where they went down stairs and for some reason, the stairs scared me. I told them I took the elevator up, so why can’t I take it down? I remembered where the elevator was and went toward it.

Then, the gravity shifted. The way to the elevator felt as if it were becoming an incline. I grabbed a hold of what I could, but my shoes were slipping. I pulled myself up to press the button. The button was a “toggle” kind with two round button lights that light red when you press them. The doors opened and I had to grab hold of the spaces between the doors and pull myself up and then grab the back railing to pull myself up the rest of the way to lay against the panel with the floor buttons and let the doors close.

Later, I remember being left behind and I had to climb up scaffolding that had random electronics and I had to take a binder with me, making climbing even harder. I was pissed because when I came through the first time, I took a shortcut. Now it was blocked off.

I gave up and left my stuff up there as I went back down to the main room.

This turned into some Disney kids show where two kid investigators went on adventures. One was played by a young Kenan Thompson. lol

I asked them for help and pointed out how high I climbed - it was next to a ladder lined with a bright yellow tarp material.

The main room we were in was cluttered with a ton of random broken things as well as some mixing bowls. I looked in a large mixing bowl that was on a stove/heater thing. It was a butterscotch colored batter with a human eye that blinked.

Kenan’s character pretended to taste it and a cartoon tongue came out and he said, “Ew!”

There were three monsters in the room. The leader looked a little like that monster with eyes on his hands from Pan’s Labyrinth. He wiped some kind of dripping mud from where his eyes should be on his face and he was missing eyes. He said he’d help us, but they would need our eyes. The lobster/bird monster and a hairy monster silently showed they still had their eyes and only pretended to blind themselves. How would the blind one ever know?

I remember Matt got some flashy, well-paid job at some startup.

I was walking down the hallway of a large office building and it opened into a large comfy conference room that had neat lighting with dark gray walls with wood-colored accents and brown couches along the wall.

I didn’t just want to walk into the meeting room where Matt was because he was meeting with people, but I remember there was a really bright light shining from the room - it was coming from a silver laptop and went away when the person shut it.

I was in a skirt, hose, suit jacket, and heels - as if I was going for an interview.

When the meeting let out, an older, fatter, and taller man was speaking with Matt (both were wearing suits). I said hi and asked him if there were any openings in his company that I could apply for.

The tall man sat on one of the plush leathery couches, suspicious of me. He didn’t know me, but he was working to get a friend of his hired on without going through the hiring process.

He told Matt to think twice about hiring me because I was “three pieces to Sunday.” I had no clue what this meant and just shrugged.

Matt had this look like, “seriously, dude?”

He walked to and sat on the couch and said something like, “Well, then, she would need to provide three different birth certificates…”

I said something like, “That makes sense, you probably had to because you do the work of three people here.”

Matt said, “I’m not there, yet. When I’m late for work, you’ll know I’m there. When I’m absent [can’t remember].”

The tall man did not like this.

I remember working in a prison-like space next to the building I currently work in in waking life. Prisoners were escaping and I went to the door and questioned if I was actually able to leave.

I remember trying to step over a short fence. I was grabbed, my wrists were bound in twiney rope and thrown onto the back of very old truck. The bed of the truck had “walls” made of planks of wood. Others were thrown in - mostly men that were trying to escape.

We were driven past the current Kroger Bakery, but in my dream, it was the Ford plant. We were taken to were Fort Hayes is currently, but in my dream, it was a pasture with barbed wire fences.

They made us walk into the area and I was afraid they were just going to line us up and shoot us.

I remember a dream where Matt and I were volunteering at some bar. A woman came in with a fake voucher for $20 worth of food and drinks, but Matt caught on quickly and refused. The lady then walked to the door and a guy with a video camera popped up and the lady had a microphone and started doing some kind of “reporting.” She claimed the owner of the bar (pointed at Matt) uses vouchers to get customers to come, but then doesn’t accept the vouchers.

Later, I remember checking my phone, thinking about how I should get some hours at my work since it was the first day back after the week and a half off, but decided to stay because Matt was stressed out because we were understaffed.

Then, Jennifer and some other people came in and sat in a circle. I don’t remember exactly what was said anymore, but I do remember Matt showing photos of miniatures and action figures he posed to show what he wanted to do to the fraud lady (kick her ass using MMA moves, basically). I also remember he had a photo of the corner of a nearby street that had a mosaic image of Saturn and Jupiter.

I also remember some guy telling Matt he needs to get a better job (he thought he worked at the bar for lousy wages) and then told Jennifer she should be finding him a job. That pissed me off and I was like, “Why is that her job to find him work?” 

I remember being in a place like the Vet’s Memorial, but there was an outdoor stadium and I worked there. My department was like my waking life’s department with the same people, but a much nicer office. I remember being rewarded for something (by people who looked like they they were government officials) that I didn’t see as a big deal. I was annoyed because it was right when I was trying to “put out fires” so to speak and help organize some event, while Erin at work was told to move my stuff to the second floor because I got a promotion, but I didn’t want to have to go up stairs every day so I told her not to move my stuff, etc. Charlie* randomly showed up later to help at the event, but went to someone else and didn’t acknowledge me. He was dressed and acted professionally.

* Name has been changed.

So I remember driving at night in a city. I think I missed the street to turn on and was almost at a dead end that had train tracks (I remember  the railroad crossing sign). I was at a weird part of the block where the intersections were close, so I moved up and stopped when I heard ambulance sirens. I was on a bridge with a round white guardrail to my right. I was going to turn left down the next street, but waited because I saw the ambulance lights flashing in the windows of the brick buildings there.

I remember getting really drowsy as if I were having a sleep attack, but I forced myself awake.

A car pulled up behind me and I thought the driver would just get impatient and drive in the oncoming lane to go around me - hopefully not when the ambulance was turning. I put the car in park and wondered if I should put my blinkers on.

I heard the driver (and maybe the passenger) get out and saw their silhouettes walking toward my car. I put the car in drive and turned down that road on my left and sped away.

Note: I thought in the dream I was around the D.C. area (I only ever visited the city once, for 6 hours, in waking life) and I found that the guardrails match D.C.’s guardrails: See the image from Google Maps/Streetview.

Later, I had three dreams that I kept waking up from, but not all the way. I thought I was dreaming about the work I did in waking life, but it was really false awakenings and the “work” I was doing was from an internship in the dream. It was something where I had to fill in values in an Excel-like table.

I dreamed I was interning at a crime unit in a police station or something. I was given “IT” work to do, but I remembered listening to them talk about a serial killer.

For some reason, we kept our department lights turned off, so the whole dream was lit by computer and TV screens, blinking lights from the large servers we had in the room, and one projection screen. The large room we were in also was in a larger building that was part of a mall-like place. It was near New Years I think and my friends and I planned to hang out there after my shift.

They found some information about a Sun_____ (can’t remember the brand name) Systems or something like that. One of the agents (or maybe it was another staff) said they recognized the name, but couldn’t remember where. They did that cheesy thing where they tried to calm him down and have him try to remember where the last time he saw that logo. He still couldn’t remember, but thought that it had something to do with cooling.

One girl got on a computer and looked it up and found that the brand/logo is from a heating/cooling company and their air conditioners are found all over the place - usually in server rooms of big corporations.

The guy said, “That’s right!” and told them he remember seeing it when he worked at a office park in an area nearby.

I was bored and went “exploring” the room and found where one of the people involved killed himself. It was so dark, but I remember walking to the spot (that was supposedly cleaned up) and then looked at the TV on the wall.

It was a news report showing security footage of the guy getting up from his chair, putting a gun to his left temple and blowing his head off. It was really gory and I thought, “Wow, they really showed that on TV?” and then showed the same event from another angle. I started to look away thinking, “I REALLY don’t need dreams about people shooting themselves in the head. I might sleepwalk and I hide things like scissors and razors to avoid accidentally doing stupid things like cutting or shaving my head in my sleep. Imagine if I had a gun.” *Shiver* The news changed to war violence.

I sat down in the office chair - it was cold, almost as if it were wet. For some reason I was thinking, “so this is where the guy was and he stood up - I’m not standing up, too lazy - and shot himself.”

I don’t know why, but I pushed the chair away and sat on the floor - it was colder and obviously wet. I thought it was condensation from the A/C units around me cooling the computers and servers. There was a blue? tarp on the table and I was surprised when I grabbed it how liquid dropped down my hand. It was cold, but obviously did not flow like water. I tried to look at it in the light from the screens.

While this was happening, a young female agent with short black hair was going over stuff with a slightly older male agent with brown hair. You could see on her face (lit by the projection screen) a growing suspicion of the male agent.

I finally was able to make out a dark red liquid on my hand and realized I have been sitting in blood that whole time. I got up and was able to make out the Sun____ Systems logo on a A/C unit right next to me. I rushed over to the female agent and whispered (a little too loudly) “WET blood!” I meant to convey someone was killed very recently - this isn’t from the suicidal guy. I said, “WET!” to emphasize the point. She nodded and understood and pointed for me to run away.

I ran out of the room into some other rooms - one was a daycare or something - and the door leading outside had a rubber thing holding the doorknob to keep the doorknob closed. I was able to remove it quickly, but the blood on my hands made it hard to turn the knob. Luckily the female agent came running to help.

Then I woke up.

I remember a nice older blond lady with short hair looking at my apartment, planning to sell it or find a roommate for me (despite only having one bedroom).

That eventually turned into a dream still in my apartment where I was doing customer service and was searching for a location of a business close to a customer’s home. The customer was in my apartment wearing a red sweater and she was originally from Washington D.C. I told her I’d look for a location - maybe in Virginia. I had such a hard time trying to write and read back her address. There was a lot of numbers and I think the street was a letter. Not only did I have an issue reading it back and verbalizing the numbers, some were crossed out and it made it even harder.

After a while, the girl gave up and pushed me in an office chair(?) to the outside wall. Part of it (where my bookcases are) was covered in wood paneling and had a door. I was worried she was mad at me for not being able to write down/speak back her address and she planned to push me out some door that goes outside, several stories up. Instead, she smiled and hugged me in a way that was like, “everything is going to be OK.” That creeped me out even more!

I don’t remember if it was in Columbus, but I remember the building I was in was in a “downtown” with tall buildings nearby.

I remember waking up in a apartment with large windows and I think I was on the third floor, but it might have been higher.

Outside my window was a building that looked similar to this building:

https://www.google.com/maps?ll=39.963363,-82.993649&spn=0.001933,0.00284&t=h&z=19

There was a crane in front of it to the right and I remember thinking, “They are ALWAYS doing some kind of construction.”

I got up and my apartment was laid out similarly to my current one with two main rooms and the kitchen had a breakfast bar facing the window. The carpet was not shag and was a nice gray color. The windows were the length and height of the outside walls and I really liked how the light came in. There were black areas holding the panes together, but I don’t remember any window coverings.

I remember going into the hallway - it was a newer, business-like building and in the center, on both sides, there were public bathrooms, elevators, and stairwells. There was a lady that was mad that she couldn’t leave the building without going downstairs. I thought she was crazy since it was the third floor or so.

The walls in these “public” areas were windows like inside the apartment and had great views of the surrounding city buildings and streets.

I remember having a computer or tablet with an interface with dynamic buttons.

I had to switch it to “voicemail” by pressing the button above the orange square.

The voicemail was from Sean. I had to look for my TV remote and turn down my TV to listen it it a second time.

The voicemail was him pretending to be a bill collector or something and when he got to my address, he said a mixture of past addresses and then stopped and asked Kara, who was in the car with him, to look up my address. She found it quick on her phone. He said, “You found it already?” and she said, “Yep!” He said, “Well, giggity glop!” (This was also subtitled in my computer)…

Then my phone rang and woke me up - it was Sean.

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Other than that, I had a dream about working somewhere with my same boss and even though it was 2:30 a.m. and I was trying to hide the Web surfing i was doing during “downtime,” she asked me to buy a chocolate cake for a birthday party the next day and I was frustrated because that meant getting up early.

I left and right before I fell asleep, Mitch* (new character!) called me to chat. I really wanted to chat, but I was really wanting to sleep.

Also, I remember my desk was gray and I drank like, two Rockstar Low Carbs in my dream.

* Name has been changed