I was helping set things up for the first day of a large conference. I had a team I was supposed to escort to a list of rooms, in which they were doing whatever work was involved with the setup. I was helping them find the rooms, because the conference was being held at the university I attended, and I was familiar with the campus. Someone had given me a set of about six little placards with the room numbers printed on them. They all had a number, a dash, and then a letter, like "14-J," but the rooms were actually organized by letter and then by number, which was confusing for people not familiar with the layout.
We started in a gigantic auditorium, not similar to anyplace actually on the campus. After getting the list of rooms from my mom, who was a coordinator for the conference, I took them through a side door and up some stairs, and then we were in a hallway on the third floor of the Physical Sciences building, which is the Mathematics Department. The first room was my old office. The door was locked. The team I was helping said they'd been told I would have keys to all the rooms. So we went back to the auditorium to find my mom, and told her I hadn't been issued the keys. She said that there weren't enough keys to go around, so she'd have to come with us and unlock doors. She was annoyed that all the doors hadn't already been unlocked. We unlocked the one to my old office, although inside it was much larger than that office is in real life, and set up like a conference room.
At this point, the group stopped following me, possibly because they were doing setup in that first room. But the dream shifted, and the list of rooms was now offices instead of conference rooms, and it was no longer clear why I needed my mom to unlock them. The second office, based on the letter grouping, was going to be adjoining the main office. We got in there, and the first thing we noticed was that the name on the office leading to the right (in real life, that door actually goes to the mail room) had the name of my friend Greg on it. He's going to be teaching at the university next fall, so this actually made sense, aside from his office being where the mail room is. That was not the office we were looking for, though.
We looked to the left, and the office for the department chair was the correct one. But the name on that office was Greg's brother Steve, and the correct name placard was sitting on the floor. I was absolutely sure that Steve was not the new chair of the mathematics department, although the name on the floor was the name of some movie character (who I can't remember) and not the name of the actual department chair. I didn't have a problem with the department being chaired by a movie character, but I knew Steve wasn't supposed to be there.
I had a winning ticket for some promotional the McDonald's in the town where I grew up was running. The prize was a free small hamburger, like they put in a Happy Meal. It came in a Happy Meal box, but with the rest of what's normally in there missing. I was eating the hamburger, but disappointed that there were no fries.
I was in my parents' house, talking with an ancient Egyptian prince, trying to calm him down but knowing his anger was justified. How he ended up in modern America wasn't revealed in the dream; it was just assumed background. But it was clear that he'd been here long enough to learn (heavily accented) English. He was unhappy about various ways artifacts from his culture had been handled by museums, in particular some religious desecrations. My repeated argument that it was all from a long-dead culture and we had no idea he'd end up being around to complain was getting harder and harder to support, especially since he had the full backing of the modern Egyptian government.
We'd been walking from someplace else in town and had just entered the house. I said something in passing about a pharaoh's death mask, meaning the one for King Tut. He looked shocked that we had this, and demanded to see it. This lead to the awkward detail that the museum it was stored in was located in the flower bed on the west side of my parents' house, and was mostly overgrown by the plants there.
We walked along the flower bed, looking for the mask display. He asked how I could even find anything with all the plants hiding the display pieces, and I showed him the shelf running along the top of the house wall, with pictures of the artifacts sitting on it. I found the one with the picture of the death mask. I tried to remember how to say the name "Tut-Ankh-Amun," but started out "Amun-Ankh," then couldn't remember the rest. The prince corrected me, saying the full name was "Amun-Ankh-En-Arem." We then looked around to find the actual display. The mask was sitting face down, to the right of where it should have been, and partially buried in leaves. The prince was not happy.
