Dream: Back to Work

Someone posted a question on Twitter the other day: Has anyone been having especially weird dreams lately?

It's a weird time in America. Deaths from COVID-19 continue to rise. Donald Trump, who somehow won the electoral college in 2016 and was installed as president, has managed, after considerable effort, to contract the virus, and while he received levels of treatment unavailable to us peasants, it is likely he is still infected - and he insists on having in-person campaign events, including one yesterday at the White House. (2000 were invited. About 400 showed up. Word is many of those who showed up were paid to do so.) Trump is trying to push through hearings for Amy Coney Barrett, the ultra-conservative activist judge (with three years experience on the bench) he nominated to fill the Supreme Court seat of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg just days after Ginsburg's death and less than two months before the election. Right-wing terrorists in Michigan have been arrested for plotting to abduct Governor Gretchen Whitmer and overthrow the state government through armed violent insurrection. Huge swaths of the west coast are still on fire. We've run out of letters in the alphabet for hurricanes in the Atlantic, and Louisiana is currently dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Delta. Less than four weeks to the election, Luzerne County's mail-in ballots were (allegedly) just sent out on Friday from a facility in Akron, Ohio.

I'm still working from home, as I have been since March. My organization is taking this disease seriously, but there are concerns that the top management of our parent company may issue a business-as-usual order and call us back to the building at any time. And that's what my dream was about.

It didn't start off like that. Or maybe it did. It started off with me going to visit my cousin a block away, something I haven't done since the disease took hold in this area. While in real life she is holding a book for me that she acquired from the books-for-sale shelves at the library where she works, in the dream I think I was going up to pick up some plants. I got them from her father, who has been dead for fifteen years, and we spoke briefly, possibly about me going back to work.

Next thing I knew I was there, standing in line waiting to go back into the building for the first time in ages. (In reality I've been there two or three times since we bugged out.) I don't remember the process of getting inside, but I do recall that once inside I realized I wasn't wearing my ID - it was in my pocket. The building I went into wasn't the Kafkaesque office building that I actually work in, but seemed to be the nightmarishly complex factory building I last worked at in 2012 - and which was demolished earlier this year. I took a wrong turn almost immediately and realized I was lost. Looking down, I also realized I was barefoot, a startling and very odd detail.

I wandered the building for a very long time, well past my starting time, past areas where things that I couldn't comprehend were going on. (I am suddenly remembering that I have had several other dreams in a similar factory setting.) I finally found some people I could talk to and asked about directions to my work area. They tried to help me, but I wound up getting lost again, and at one point I stopped to scratch the belly of a large white wolf-dog that was casually stretched against a wall. Eventually I found my way to a security desk, and they had a helpful YOU ARE HERE map posted above their desk. I worked out that I was on the opposite end of the building from the area where I was supposed to be, an area marked SUTTON COMPLEX. I woke up wanting to look up where that name might have come from. 

Not pictured: The map from my dream

The facility in Olyphant, PA known as Specialty Records, WEA Manufacturing, CINRAM, and finally Technicolor. I worked here from 1992 - 2007 and again from 2007 - 2012. Technicolor closed down in 2018, and the place was finally demolished in June 2020. Fun fact: for much of the time I was there, my emergency evacuation spot was "the big oil tank in back," top center in picture - one of many places I would not want to be in the event of an emergency.

 

As far as dreams go, this isn't even in the top ten for weirdness. It seems like a variation of the standard "can't find my class" / "can't find the room for the final for the class I forgot to go to all semester" dream. The "barefoot" detail was something I've never had before.

(...I just remembered I had another dream a while ago, about being summoned back to Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Sciences as an adult. While I had a hard time finding the classroom and got there late, I wasn't the last one to show up, and I quickly relaxed when I realized that this was a program solely focused on learning about cutting-edge science, in a non-competitive, ungraded environment. I meant to write about that, but never did.)

Note 1: Getting lost in the bowels of a building is something I'm familiar with in real life.

Note 2: There was apparently a sequence in this dream where I attempted to make eggs for breakfast and discovered all of our eggs were broken. Some had fractured shells, others were completely shattered, bits of shell floating in raw eggs in the egg keeper. I was pretty upset about this, and was relieved to see that in reality our egg supply is intact.