Dream: Visiting the NYC Work Location

I’m in New York City visiting an office / residential building.  One or more floors of the building is occupied by my employer, an international company that I just started to work for.  The IEEE occupies the fifth floor.  I’m primarily here for work, but I also think I should visit IEEE and meet some people while I’m here.

I’m walking in a hallway of the building, not really paying attention to where I am.  I go through a glass door and a large blue parrot with white or light grey underbelly flies through it in the opposite direction.   I suddenly realize that I'm in the hotel / residential part of the building, and I assume that the parrot is someone’s pet that escaped.  There are glass doors at the end of the hall – the entrance to the gift shop.  I turn around and head back to the office areas.

I walk out the main front doors and see a cellphone on the pavement of the parking lot.  It has separated from the fall, so I pick up the pieces, which include the back cover, the battery and the SIMM card.  I know I should probably bring it back inside, but having just left, I don’t feel like going back in.  So I continue walking toward the street where there’s an open-air cafe.  Fortunately I see a high-level administrative assistant walking briskly away from the building, so I show it to her.  She wants to know where I found it.  She draws a diagram of the parking lot on a piece of lined parper.  I show her on the diagram how it was in the main aisle of the parking lot, behind the third car.  She identifies the parking spot as JP’s, a “Chief” executive, so she seems willing to take the phone in case it’s his.

I start wondering about the long drive back home, especially about what time I should leave in order to avoid lots of traffic.  (There’s really no traffic-free time to leave NYC, but any time close to “rush hour” would be especially bad.)  I keep seeing a large analog clock that reads 6pm, an especially bad time to leave.  It’s puzzling because it appears to be midday.  But then I notice that the clock appears on a very large TV screen, and it’s part of a commercial for a medication called Xarelto.  So it’s really much earlier than that.

I walk over to the outdoor dining area of a pub, which is behind the large building.  At one round table I see three young folks that I know because we once took a class together.  I’m happy to see them, and the table seats four, so it looks like a great place to sit for a while.  But I see that they’re done with their meals, so I decide to just say “hi” and walk on by so that they don’t feel obligated to stay with me when my food eventually arrives.  After all it’s lunch time, and I’m sure they’re on a lunch break from their jobs, so they won’t be able to linger.  I see an older man who’s alone.  (He’s older than those folks, but about my age, I suppose.)  I sit down at his table, and we start chatting.  He mentions that he used to turn his garden over every Spring before planting, but now he no longer does so because experts say it’s bad for a garden.  I agree with him and say that I, too, used to turn over my garden, but I stopped.  Then I go into an explanation of why it’s bad.  It has to do with fungi.  There’s a huge underground network of mycelium that gets damaged by heavy-handed shoveling.  (But I can’t think of the word “mycelium” and I either mumble it or say “mycology”.)  I explain how the mycelium process the minerals in the soil and provide plants with nourishment (as I’ve read in an excerpt of the research of Paul Stamets).  I wonder if I’m annoying or boring the other man – I seem to be monopolizing the conversation.