Every so often, I find myself walking through an old  office in my recurring dreams.  Not the one I finished in — the old one, the one in my dream with too many levels and corridors that led nowhere. I’m always a visitor. I walk through, looking around, trying to make sense of why I’m there. The people are half-familiar but slightly wrong, as if my mind filled in faces from memory and got the details mixed up. No one seems to notice I don’t work there anymore.

Before these dreams, it used to be bathrooms — endless searches for one that worked, or ones I couldn’t use because the design made no sense. Then it was buildings with too many rooms, too many doors, no clear way in or out. Now it’s the old workplace. Familiar, but not right.

And sometimes, even further back, I dream that Officeworks calls to tell me I still work there. The store was demolished years ago, but in the dream, I show up anyway. There are no customers, no staff, and no uniform for me. The work is easy — too easy — like a simulation of something that used to be real.

At first, I thought it was nostalgia. But it doesn’t feel sentimental. It feels procedural, as though my mind is running a quiet audit in the background: Do you still belong here?

When you leave a place after a long time, the exit is rarely clean. You move on in life before your sense of identity catches up. The mind, it seems, takes longer to off-board.

In these dreams, the spaces aren’t literal. They’re versions of self — rooms I’ve worked in before. The confusing buildings were transition. The bathrooms were release. The empty stores and silent offices are reflection: walking through past roles to check whether they still hold meaning.

Each time, I leave easily. But I never quite know why I was there in the first place.  Maybe that’s the point — to learn that not everything has to resolve neatly. Some chapters don’t need rewriting, just acknowledgment.

When I wake, I’m reminded that closure isn’t a single act. It’s a slow reorganisation — a quiet inventory of who you were, what you learned, and what no longer fits. The old offices stay where they are. I just visit now and then, to see what’s still worth keeping.