Dream: Alien virus or dementia?
I was going to work and it was in a building like a school. I passed a room that Ws like a very large classroom, where there were a hundred or so students watching a movie that was a mashup of 2001 and Close Encounters. In the movie they were hypothesizing that aliens were infecting humans with a virus that manifested as a narrative in the host’s mind.
A middle aged woman was interrupting the movie coming in and asking where Murray was (it was a different name). She got up to the front of the class during the movie and kept asking “Where is Murray? Has anyone seen him? He was supposed to come home.” She just kept repeating the same questions over and over, never really changing here demeanor or seeming to react to anything.
I had been watching this because I peered into the room to watch the movie. But I went into another similar room where lots of coworkers were sitting in a large circle. We were waiting for more people to arrive before starting. While we waited I was remembering some paperwork I needed to fill out. It was a notice from the government or something confirming the address of Murray. I had neglected to send it in, and as I was filling it out I felt like maybe I was to blame for the woman in the other room and her distress.
Meanwhile, in the meeting there were a couple people wondering where one of their coworkers was and why he wasn’t in the meeting. He should have been there by now and some were getting concerned.
The big question that was lingering as I began to wake from this dream was whether the woman was crazy or becoming infected with an alien virus. Was this narrative of the missing Murray real or implanted? Further, was the missing coworker becoming a narrative at work?
The weird connection this dream had with reality is that yesterday I was visiting my grandma in her nursing home and she has a tendency to ask the same questions over and over.