Dream #1
I sat at a long, wood desk that reached halfway across the room. The room was like a classroom. The lights were off, and dim, mid-day, natural light came in through the windows. I was writing out or drawing a spreadsheet. I was trying to find people in a specific area, maybe Texas.
I may have stood up, turned around, and brought the spreadsheet in to my boss BS. I then walked into a place like a construction workshop. A lot of women were working in the shop. The shop was smallish and full of pipes and columns.
I had the memory of a conversation about making cars. The conversation may have been with an older man. The man may have said something like, "It's easy to make one half of the car and to make the other half and to put them together. But the whole car is only made by people who care."
As I remembered this, and felt like I agreed with it, most of the women funneled out of the workshop. I worried for a moment that I had offended the women with my thought; after all, I reflected, they were working to make cars.
One woman, an Asian woman, was still working. She stood as if on a stool or platform, to reach the top of a wooden table that was maybe six feet high, almost like the top bunk of a bunk bed.
Under the table was an arrangement of hoses and pipes. All the pipes were black and had a clean, plasticky, but lusterless, look about them. Some of the pipes, tubes, and hoses were even and straight; others coned outwards and then back inward for a portion; others had accordion-like portions.
The pipes were all of varying sizes. Some of the larger pipes, tubes, and hoses extended from under the table and out along the rest of the workshop. I walked to the left end of the workshop, looking down at the pipes.
The woman told me, "We aren't done yet. We still have to paint this set of pipes yellow." I saw that some of the pipes, pretty much one coherent line of interwound pipes, were now painted yellow. The woman continued, "We even have to paint the engine parts."
I didn't quite understand the woman's statement. I asked, "So suppose I wanted to paint blue the series of pipes that connect to the air conditioning system?" I imagined or saw a series of pipes now painted blue. The first pipe that came out from the under the table was shallowly "J" shaped and nestled in a metal vessel like a bedpan, which was also painted blue.
I continued, asking, "Would I also --"
The woman picked up on my statement and continued it, " -- the engine parts blue as well. But blue isn't a color we use for that part of the system." (She may actually have said, "Blue isn't a color we use very often.")
The woman stood on the ground, where I had been standing while looking at the yellow and blue pipes. I stood across the workshop from the woman, with my back to a long writing desk. To the woman's left was a black pipe that had been painted white. The woman was speaking about painting this system of pipes white.
I heard a man talking. My view changed into reading. I read as I heard the man speak. The man spoke about how he would have done things differently in his youth if he could have. He said he would have run, played football, and skied.
At first I thought the man was speaking about all these activities in a demeaning way, as if he were doing them now and they made him an animal. But now I understood that these were activities of the leisure class, the highest class.
The man said, "I would have gone for any of the very few positions that everybody was scrambling for at the time of scarcity following the war."
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