A friend and I were going to work at this elaborate brick building out in the middle of nowhere. (The friend wasn't someone I actually know, but in the dream it was just understood that we were friends.) I think we were living together. We work for a news program – undoubtedly because I watched The Newsroom last night – and we went to sit at a big table in a bigger room full of people. Our team was "world news" or something like that. The anchor came in and started firing people from different teams whose jobs he thought were useless, including several from ours (one who ran the twitter feed and a few more). I didn't get fired, but had the sense that this was more because he forgot about me than that he actually thought I was an important member of the team. My friend is emphatically not useless, and in fact is the star of the staff.
Afterwards, my friend and I are on a mezzanine overlooking the room. Some stuff happens that I don't really remember other than an overweight man in a tuxedo who looked like one of the rich guys from Titanic coming over to talk to us. Finally my friend says something about cutting out of work early and I follow her off the mezzanine into some kind of hall, trying to talk her out of it. She's clearly trying very hard to brush me off. So eventually I shout at her that I just want to talk to her for five minutes, doesn't she have five minutes to talk to me? Reluctantly she stands still with her hand on a doorknob and I try to explain myself to her. I can't really remember, but I think I was talking about how she didn't understand how insecure I felt about this job, and I needed her help because I didn't know how to be good at it, and I think towards the end I was saying that if she was a good friend she'd be considerate of me.
Here's where it gets absurd: As I said the last sentence, my friend pulled open the door to where she was going – and the room inside is filled with penguins. Except they're bigger than penguins and the same as people, at least in that they understand English. After opening the door I had said "fucking" quite loudly, and all of the penguins are staring at me. The one nearest the door is a child, and I become aware that I'm in big trouble for having sworn in from of the child-penguin. A man who looked like James Franco is in the room with the penguins, and he's furious with me and starts chasing me. I run out of the building, through a series of courtyards, and down the driveway to the country road where we'd come in. Stuff I had apparently been carrying is scattered all over the road and I frantically try to pick it up before the bus comes.
The bus line is called "GemCosies", because before you go on it you cover your valuables in tea cosies. I was trying to shove my purse (this highly impractical velvet clutch), a check, and a hundred dollar bill into a cosie that just looked like a large coffee filter (irony?). I'm still trying to do this when the bus comes and so miss it, but it's okay because despite this being a country lane in the middle of nowhere, a bus comes every few minutes.
Then the man who was chasing me catches up to me and tackles me. It doesn't hurt but with the help of dream-physics he pushes me far down a driveway and again my things scatter. As I'm scrambling to get my stuff and run back to the lane, another bus passes by. After that I woke up.
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I think the dream was about all the anxiety I have about getting/keeping a job after grad school and the social aspect of doing so. Also whenever I watch The Newsroom, in the back of my mind I'm thinking, Oh god, how are so many of these people so close to me in age? I would be completely lost in that kind of work environment.
The way the dream journal challenge works is that for two weeks you record whatever dreams you remember in blog posts like this one (here's an article on remembering your dreams better), and then you can pick one or more / combine all of them as the basis for a story or poem. I can't enter the Dream Journal Challenge, but if I could, I'm pretty sure this dream would legitimize submitting The Newsroom fanfiction.
