Andy's Bernard's Cell Phone

MORNING OF JULY 20, 2009

This is another one of my dreams that involves the cast of The Office. (This time it is a little surprising, as I haven't watched an episode since the season finale last spring.) Anyway, I had gone along with pretty much the entire office staff (as though I were one of them) on some kind of retreat.

We were lodging in a big house, and my first clear memory is all of us being in the very large basement area and unpacking our things. Andy Bernard was freaking out because he couldn't find his cell phone. True to character, he was trying to be cool and not lose his temper, and only marginally succeeding.

I actually noticed his cell phone lying on the floor in an adjacent room, but I didn't tell him, because I had the idea for a prank that Jim could play on him. In the dream world I thought it would be funny if Jim pretended to be some important client and called and left a series of increasingly agitated voice mails on Andy's phone while he didn't have it. Then we'd reveal the phone to him and watch him freak out as he played his missed voice mails.

I waited for Andy to go into other parts of the house on his search before trying to explain my idea to Jim. It seems, however, that every time I attempted to do this, we would be distracted and interrupted before I could explain things.

Then, suddenly, a tremendous, severe storm hit and caused some degree of damage to the area. Andy and a few others from our group, including Michael Scott and some random old man who was supposed to be in charge of things, left to go search the area in the storm. We didn't mean to let Andy actually leave without his phone, but he did.

About this time I noticed that the adjacent room that his phone was in had flooded a little bit during the storm, and his phone was totally wet and probably ruined. I felt bad.

Somewhere in the midst of all this I remember a scene of just Pam sitting and reacting to something with odd expressions. She had a weird and slightly unflattering hairdo--trying to look too glamorous, I thought.

Finally the crew that had gone out in the storm returned. Jim and I gave Andy his waterlogged phone, and he was really upset because apparently he had some irretrievable info on there that was gone now. Besides feeling guilty, this all just seemed to reflect poorly on us that we were goofing off and didn't tell him where his phone was before it got ruined. We were afraid we'd be in trouble with the bosses, but, somehow, something we had inadvertently done was viewed by that old man who was in charge as being a very good thing (I can't remember the details). So we got praised instead of getting in trouble! How sitcom-esque is that ending?

Also something in the dream about being back in the Kentucky neighborhood I lived in for a few years during my childhood. I seemed to be my current age, but all my neighborhood friends that I saw looked like they did back then. I was in the bedroom of the little girl that had lived next door, playing with Transformers or something.

I suddenly noticed there was a large rug that covered the floor. It had colorful pictures depicting a scene of teddy bears riding plush alligators as though they were horses, taking them across a finish line. I kept looking at it and feeling very nostalgic, even though this rug is not a real thing from my past. It's really strange how overwhelming the sense of nostalgia was.