forgotten words

I had an interesting little snippet this morning before waking up. The plot of the dream was that I was supposed to be working on a large-ish project--I don't know if it was a school/research project, a translation project, or something else. Whatever it was, I hadn't been working on it and was feeling stressed. I was in a strange apartment that didn't belong to me, and it seemed like the inhabitants might have been in the process of moving in or out. There was apparently no bathroom in the apartment, because several times during the dream I had to go downstairs to relieve myself in a hovel-like outhouse dug into a grassy bank outside the soviet-bloc-style apartment building.

Every time I used the primitive facilities I realized with a start that here I was, taking a bathroom break again after having not accomplished anything toward my project (I think at this point I wondered if I were really dreaming or not). That was the depressing part. The neat part was that surrounding the "bathroom" the grassy ground was covered with all sorts of debris, notably all kinds of coins, from current EU coins to more exotic coins that were clearly very old. I wanted to pick them all up for later sorting and perusal. On my last bathroom trip, getting quite depressed about my lack of productivity, I looked closer at the ground and realized that there were also words there. I don't know what they were made of--they were really just *words*, the essence of them, not words printed onto some material. On closer inspection I realized that they were all words that had fallen out of use, and I was very excited by the discovery. I loved the idea that here were all of these forgotten words, laying on the ground. I forgot my depressing procrastinatory situation and woke up still excited about the extinct words.