Two dreams

I had a vivid dream about the last day of work Saturday night. It was set in my old elementary school, and several of us were scrambling from room to room trying to shut things down. I forgot about the dream entirely when I awoke, and only remembered it hours later when I was thinking about a haunted house held in the elementary school years after it closed.

I had two more vivid dreams last night, and remembered them both. This time I wanted to write them down before I could forget.

1. I was going over some letters someone I had once been seeing had written me, and for some reason brought a magnet into close contact with them. The magnet caused hidden messages on the papers to be revealed - messages and images that had been on the paper before, or on paper close to the paper that was being exposed to the magnet. I tried this with some blank sheets of paper, and messages from decades earlier appeared - one that I remember vividly was a child's account of visiting a zoo, complete with watercolor images of a lion. Unfortunately, we soon discovered that overexposure to magnets caused these messages to melt and slough off the paper, leaving behind a watery mess.

2. I had another dream about work. This one was set after the last day of work, and I had to go back in to fill out some paperwork, as did about half a dozen other people I knew, including our top manager. Since, as in real life, our company no longer occupies the location, things were awkward. A new business had moved in and was refurnishing the place, building new rooms and halls. Even though they weren't fully operational yet, a number of their employees were already there. They had an aged rich hippie vibe to them - it was the sort of place where everyone practiced transcendental meditation, people wore gold lamé bellbottoms and Nehru jackets, and they probably marketed ayurvedic business-to-business solutions or something like that. Their lead manager - a woman with long curly hair who looked like a middle-aged yoga instructor - tried to convince several of us to join their company. At one point I decided to step out of the building. I wandered through a section that was still as we had left it, into a new corridor, past some unfamiliar people, and stepped out to a place far from where I thought I would be, looking out at buildings damaged by the June 13 tornado.

So. Melting hidden messages and aged hippies in gold lamé. Fun stuff.