In waking life, a coworker recently died of a heart attack. This turned into a dream that combined with some episode of “The Office.”
It was when Steve Carell was still the manager and his character Michael was being over dramatic about the passing of the coworker. He threw away his mail saying, “What’s the point?”
Some of the mail was a large USPS envelope. The character Jim was in the manager’s office as well. I said, “Could I open your mail then?” Jim said it was trash once he threw it away.
I grabbed the mail and opened the USPS envelope first. It was a large stack of small postcards and notes – most from the head office and some from Channel 6 Good Morning Columbus TV show. I even got the commercial jingle in my head while looking at the front of the cards. The postcards were oxidized, even though they were only a few months old. (I sell century-old postcards in waking life.) I told them, “I love old postcards!”
One of the head office notes talked about congratulating our department with free pie. I remembered in the dream, Michael coming in with pie randomly, not knowing why.
There were letters from Channel 6 telling the now dead coworker to get well soon. I was impressed that a news station did that kind of outreach.
Later, I found a scrapbook that belonged to the dead coworker. It had some red pages, but it was partly filled with doodles of pomegranates (pomegranates represent life after death or the afterlife in my symbology). I drew an image of a pomegranate in his sketchbook as an acknowledgment/sign of respect.
Later, I found another sketchbook – this one was all red. There were more doodles of pomegranates. I told the character, Pam, about my idea about having everyone draw a pomegranate and sign and date it as a “remembrance” idea.
I flipped to the end because I felt I was waking up and flipped backward through the sketchbook. The coworker had drawn storyboards for a cartoon where the main character was an elephant (in a button-up shirt) who worked in an office and dreamed of retirement (chilling on a lawn chair on the beach in swim trunks, holding a martini with an olive). It ended abruptly when the sketchbook ran out of pages.
My coworker was only a couple of years away from retirement.
Elephants generally symbolize “always remember.”