I dreamed that I was at work and I was asked to attend a meeting with some of the big-wigs in the finance department. I work from home so in my dream the place where we were was my house even though it really looked a lot like my grandma's house in Claremont, CA.
As I was getting ready to attend the meeting I realized that I only had one sheet of paper left in my notebook, so I decided to stop by the supply room to pick up a new one. The supply room was on the fourth floor, which meant I was now in an office building which had my grandma's house as the first floor. As I stepped on the elevator I could see all the finance guys in their suits heading into the conference room for the meeting. I knew that I needed to hurry so that I would not be late.
When I got to the fourth floor I walked down the hallway to the supply room. I opened the door, went in, and quickly found the notebooks. I grabbed one off the stack and turned to leave, but found that there was a sign on the back of the supply room door. The sign explained that the door was broken from that side.
I glanced around the small supply room for an alternate exit and I saw a tall step ladder pushed up against one of the supply cabinets. Above the cabinet I could see that there was a small rectangular opening in the wall (maybe 3 feet wide and 1 foot high). I climbed up the step ladder, awkwardly squeezed myself through the small opening, and dropped to the floor in the hallway on the other side.
Right down the hall from the supply room was the break room. I was kind of hungry and I figured that since it was on the way back to the elevator that it wouldn't hurt to grab a snack (in my dream my work provided free snacks).
As a side note, I must mention here that my daughter Eve has challenged me (in real life) to not eat any sugary treats for thirty days. So no soda, candy, ice cream, etc. It started on Jan 6 and will mercifully end on Feb 5, not that I am counting down or anything.
Unfortunately my dream self was aware of this challenge and did not realize that dream treats do not violate the terms of the challenge. So because of the challenge I was determined to grab a healthy snack like a fruit cup or something.
As I opened the door to the break room I came to understand that my mother-in-law had been hired to stock the snacks. The room was stuffed wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling with delicious, sugary snacks. There were racks of donuts, boxes of candy bars, freezers full of ice cream bars and popsicles, and even a soda fountain. I whimpered a little to myself but was determined not to give in to the temptation.
I searched around and at the bottom of one of the freezers I found a ziploc bag with a few fruit cups. Upon further examination I discovered that they had all expired years ago and were totally freezer burned. My eyes darted back and forth between the frozen chunks of rotten fruit and the stacks of donuts. I whimpered again but renewed my resolve to be strong. I would just have to go to my meeting hungry.
I went back down to the first floor and walked to my office to collect my laptop backpack. As I picked it up I found that the zipper had been left wide open and all the contents spilled all over the floor including my old notebook and several pens and pencils. I quickly tried to collect all the items, shoving them under my arms. I then scurried over to the meeting room, dropping pencils as I went.
When I got to the meeting I found that it had changed into a game of cards. Instead of the suits from finance, there were three guys sitting around a table. One was one of my current managers from work. I did not recognize the other two. The game they were playing was unfamiliar to me but they told me that they were all ready to start and were just waiting for me to pick my "wild suit". They explained that each person was allowed to choose one suit and all the cards of that suit would be wild for that player, and that we would be competing to collect and play cards.
I asked what suits they had chosen to be their wild suit because I did not want to be competing to collect the same suit as someone else. My manager, who was sitting to my left, said "clubs". Then the next guy to his left said "clubs" and the last guy (to my right) said "clubs". I thought that was really odd and a terrible strategy but I didn't say anything. Instead I announced that I would choose diamonds as my wild suit.
The game started and we were discarding cards and picking up new cards and playing cards. I did not really understand what was going on, but I was collecting a lot of diamonds because the guy to my right kept discarding them. I was feeling really good about my chances in this game.
Suddenly my manager stood up and angrily told me that he needed to have a private meeting with me in the restroom. I had no idea what had made him so furious but I put down my cards and followed him into the restroom. When we got there he turned to me and said that the game wasn't fair because the guy to my right was throwing the game by giving me all those diamonds. He said that I should do something to stop him. I acted like I was really concerned about this new information he had given to me and explained that I would see what I could do. On the inside I was just happy that I was doing so well.
When we left the restroom and headed back to the card table I found that my wife Jen had taken my manager's spot at the table. My manager did not seem to mind. He interjected some strategy advice while we played for a little while and then just kind of wandered off.
As we continued to play it became clear to me that the game had changed. People were now trying to get rid of cards instead of collect them. I also realized that the values of the cards were different than what I expected. Suddenly people were taking tricks with 2s or 3s when I had played a Jack or King. I tried to get clarification from the other players but they would not divulge any details of how the game was to be played.
Eventually I pieced together that we were playing a variation of the game Scum which I played a lot in college. As soon as I realized how to play I found that my cards were slowly being replaced with pieces of fried chicken. At first the pieces of chicken would still have little tags on them that would tell me their suit and rank, but slowly even those went away.
Despite these handicaps I was still managing to get rid of most of my cards. It came down to the last hand. Jen was in the lead. I had three pieces of chicken left (two breasts and a thigh). I was pretty confident that two of them were Queens but I couldn't remember the suits. And I thought that the last piece of chicken was a Jack but I wasn't sure. It might have been a 4.
Jen played a card and if I played the correct piece of chicken I still had a chance to win but if I didn't then I would be disqualified and Jen would win. I looked all over the three pieces of chicken in my hands to see if I could find any clues as to which one was which but there was nothing to go on. And as I turned them around in my hands the pieces of chicken were suddenly covered with a very delicious BBQ ranch sauce which made them difficult to handle and very messy.
I asked the other players if they could help me identify my cards but they said that there was no reason for them to help me. It was my problem that I couldn't identify my own cards, not theirs. They also started getting agitated because I was taking so long to make a decision so I just picked one of the breast pieces and placed it on the pile of cards in the middle of the table. BBQ ranch oozed off the chicken and spread onto the other player's cards underneath it. I looked up at the other players to see if I had chosen correctly, searching their faces in hopeful anticipation to see what their reaction would be.
I had chosen wrong. Jen won the game.
Dreamed 1/23/2020
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