I dreamt this morning that I was working with the entire SCIFI.COM staff out of a storefront office in a strip mall. I knew this because I could make out the crowded parking lot through the front windows. My real-life boss was there, as were my other real-life coworkers. Only we weren’t engaged in our real-life job of putting together a Web site, but instead were running a literary agency.

At no point were we ever actually reading manuscripts as part of this agency, however. Instead, we were opening packages arriving from writers—and, strangely, from other literary agencies—and inserting them into a large machine which resembled an old-fashioned clunky photocopier. The machine would then pass judgment and spit out an answer.

After doing this for awhile, I found myself wandering the halls of what seemed like a fancy hotel—plush carpeting, highly polished doors outside each room, lots of flower arrangements. On each door, instead of a room number, there was a plaque with the name of a literary agency or publishing company, as if when you checked in it became public knowledge in which room you stayed.

As I wandered the hall looking for my room, I was wearing nothing but a towel (as opposed to the first half of the dream, in which I was fully clothed), but unlike those anxiety dreams in which you’re in school taking a test in your underwear, I didn’t care. I was calm and serene. There seemed to be nothing unusual about it. I’d pass people I knew in the hall—Ginjer Buchanan, for example—and say hello to them and chat briefly as if I did this all the time. So there was no “Where the Hell are my pants?” about this dream.

Then, as if on cue, every door on the floor opened and everybody poured out into the hallway. Fire drill? Convention programming about to begin? TIme for lunch? I have no idea why the mass room exodus. And once more, there was no anxiety about being in the midst of this crowd in my just-stepped-from-the-shower state. (I guess I have no shame.) I merely continued looking for my room, nodding to those I knew, until I woke.