The Office Dream

Last night I dreamed about The Office again.

Now, I've been dreaming about The Office for decades. Of course, when I was a kiddie I called it The School - only as time went on did it change into The College, The Factory, The Office. The name changes, but its basic structure remains the same.

The Office is tall, a towering construction of grey slabs, confusing corridors, rooms that do not connect logically. Staircases - often spiralling - are accessed by climbing out of windows; lifts (elevators) are big, clanking mechanical machines that are relentless in their desire to move up rather than down, and often lacking safety doors on the higher floors - jumping on and off the rising platform is especially scary. Those spiralling staircases get very shaky and semi detached the higher I climb. Lower rooms are familiar, but the higher ones drafty, bare, skeletal, alien affairs.

So basically an archetypal dream investigating my fears of development, change, aging and death. I get to visit it when I'm feeling particularly vulnerable about the world and its expectations for me. Fun, huh?

This morning I found my way to the canteen, in search of beef goulash and rice. And bread. People are taking all the bread while I'm still searching for a plate for my goulash. After a few repetitions of this scenario I got bored and decided to change the dream (a useful technique if you find yourself doing the searching for pizza in the supermarket while naked dream - just intervene and steal a pair of shorts from someone else's shopping trolley). The food was tipped into a shoulder bag I imagined into existence and I got to grab a couple of rolls out of the breadbasket. Mission accomplished, The Office disappeared and scenes of an erotic nature (which I shall not detail) ensued.

Slowly, me and my subconscious, we're edging towards a Big Decision about work. Big, life-changing decisions about attempting a writing career.

In fact I'm pretty much there on the decision-making front; the only thing holding me back is the money fears. Yet with reorganisation and downsizing issues on the horizon at my real office, a reasonable redundancy package is all I need to push me onto the highest, spindliest spiral staircase of them all.

And as a sideline I could go round hippy markets offering to interpret dreams. Anyone interested?