A Metaphysical Interpretation of a Dream I've Had 17 Times

This morning I had another instance of a recurring dream that I have experienced 17 times. It is what I call the "accrued earnings" dream. It always has the same two features. In the dream I am working at a job and I suddenly realize that for a long time (usually months) I have forgotten to fill in my time card. The idea is always that I have some bonanza of accrued earnings waiting for me. Often there is the idea that if I can go to some office and explain what happened, I will be able to get all of this money I am due but have not yet received. 

Condensing the dream into a description as short as possible, the two themes are these:

(1) There was some important thing that I forgot. 

(2) Some bonanza of earnings I have earned await for me to claim. 

I have an interesting speculation that may explain the dream.  In the dream the job being worked at may symbolize your earthly life. The "accrued earnings" in the dream may symbolize some afterlife reward that will be paid upon death to every good person who lived on Earth, with a reward proportional to how long you lived or how much trouble you endured, or both.  An interesting speculation is that each of us signed up for "Earth duty," lured by a promise that at the end of such a duty our participation would be very richly rewarded -- perhaps with some ratio such as 100 or 1000 units of pleasure for every unit of pain experienced, or maybe a reward of 10,000 units of happiness for every unit of earthly unhappiness we experienced.  The "forgetting" motif in the dream may symbolize a non-earthly existence that each of us may have had before being born, something we forgot about when being born on Earth, but may one day remember. 

To understand this speculation, you would need to understand the hypothesis of the nonearthly pre-existence of the soul. I explain the concept and some evidence that may suggest it in my post "Dreams and NDEs Suggesting the Soul's Non-Earthly Pre-Existence," which you can read here. The hypothesis may be supported by frequent cases in which someone having a near-death experience may encounter some mystical realm, and may have a strong feeling that such a place is his "true home." 

I admit that I am being speculative here, and that interpreting dreams is a very tricky business. If anyone else has had a dream like the dream I have described, I would be interested to hear about it.