My first "mortician dream"*

*Note: It goes without saying that I am the only person who cares about this dream, but I'll tell it anyway. I find it interesting that this was not a nightmare--at no point was I spooked in even the least way, which leads me to believe that I am going into the right profession.

Last night I dreamed I was working (well, interning, sort of unofficially) for Mark the Funeral Director. I happened to be at the funeral home and they were busy so someone asked me to step in and help with the small stuff. I went back into the embalming room and was surprised to see a living man, dressed in a suit, laying in a casket. I never got around to asking why he was there but it made sense in my head that this was part of his pre-planning.

Then, I spent quite a bit of time being concerned about my gloves and about having a warm diet coke. I kept going to the fridge and opening cans, but they were all warm. And I had to get new gloves after every new can. Mark came up to me and asked me how I was enjoying my day so far and that I looked good in my "uniform" (scrubs). I said that the clothes were super comfortable. He led me to a closet where everyone who worked in the funeral home had nice clothes hanging--he said that they all kept nice clothes there in case they got called out.

Then, of course, we got a call. We went to a home where someone had died during the night. I went with Mark and I remember thinking that this would be my first dead body that I'd see "fresh" (which isn't true--I saw my grandma before Mark came to take her away when she died a few years ago). We walked up seven or eight flights of stairs, and I kept thinking "how are we going to get a body down these stairs?" and when we got to the room I was expecting it to be the elderly woman, but she was sitting up and talking. It was her husband in the next bed. The smell was, as hard as it is for me to describe, exactly what the smell of death is. It's intangible, hard to pick up, and completely incomparable to anything else. The elderly woman asked me to go downstairs with her and leave Mark with the body, so I did, and while walking down the stairs I woke up.