I’m not sure why I want to remember this dream. It’s unpleasant, but it has some things in it for me.

They asked me to come back to my old job, so this is where it begins, behind a desk in a quiet office.  I am streaming music softly in the background while I work, and Marybeth comes over the loudspeaker and says, “Whoever is playing that music, would you please turn it off??” And the whole office cheers.  I refused. She came out of her office to threaten me, and I told her, “All those years I listened to your shit music and never said anything? No. I’m not turning it off.”  But then an electronic “crisis” came, all computers stopped working.  My friend put her frozen tablet and phone down on my desk, and I noticed she was in the middle of texting my ex-boyfriend.  I told her she should either ask him out, or don’t ask him out, do something, but stop crying about it, and I walked away.

And then the blood came.  I was wearing gray jeans with black speckles, and the blood started pouring out of me.  Even though it was an office, there were rooms in the back furnished with bunk beds and drawers and file cabinets, decorated uniquely by each employee, like a kids room.  I started going through the drawers trying to find clean clothes. I grabbed some and then had to figure out where the bathroom was.  I sat on the toilet and the seat broke, so I fell in.

I came out and found myself in a room like a dining room, everyone was eating together, but I felt like there was still something I had to do.  I walked around rooms of people dining and talking quietly for a long time.  One of the salesmen arrived, and he was greeted happily, he was popular.  He asked me out to dinner, and I said, “I can think of no reason not to, but we have to take (my friend) along, too.”  Before he could reply, it was time for the office to close.

Now I’m in the warehouse. I’m in charge of closing the building. Two of the guys were playing around and didn’t seem to want to leave. One of the dock doors seemed stuck. Did anyone remember to give me a code to close the alarms? Yes, it was the same one I had before I left. I was trying to round them up and get them out so I could follow the closing procedures, but they were not cooperating.  Red graffiti spray-painted on gray concrete wall, green numbers on a giant overhead screen counting down minutes until the building closed.  And that is all.