Saturday, December 8, 2012

tractor beam roller coaster; justifying my job

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a car with a male relative of mine, maybe my cousin or my brother, on a hot, sunny road. The road looked like Second Avenue just above Houston Street in Manhattan, except that the street was a lot wider. The sky was so sunny it may almost have been yellow. My cousin/brother was probably in the driver's seat. I was in the passenger's seat.

Our car was stopped probably in the middle of a block. We may have ostensibly been stopped at a traffic light or stop sign, though it (now) seems like we were way too far from the end of the block to have done something like that. There weren't a lot of other cars on the street, but the cars near us were also stopped.

It seemed like we had been stopped a long time. My cousin/brother and I were talking about something, maybe to keep our minds off of the boredom of being stopped. Or, possibly, my cousin/brother may have been talking about how bored he was while we were stopped and waiting, while I was trying to distract him and make him a little more patient by talking about other stuff.

Suddenly, a fighter jet flew in front of us. It was only a hundred meteres or so up in the air, and it only seemed to be a few blocks away. It flew at a normal position for a moment, then twisted onto its right side to make a turn. Either my cousin/brother or I called out the jet.

I tried to get a better look at the jet, to determine what it was. At first I thought it was an F-35. But something about its shape didn't seem quite right. I almost knew what the jet was, but I couldn't quite think of the name.

The jet flew around to our right, seeming to get closer and closer. I could see it through my windows, just over the building tops. As the jet got closer, it took on more of a triangular shape, like the wings had become long and sleek, clinging tightly to the sides of the jet. I really had no idea what the jet was, now. I got a view of the underside of the jet, which somehow reminded me of a mix between a fighter jet and a commercial airliner.

The jet flew around the back side of our car. I turned to see the jet through the back window. t seemed to be descending. I may have had the ominous feeling that the jet was actually looking directly at my car. I may have wondered if the jet hadn't been sent to follow me as a potential criminal. Possibly to shake off the ominous feeling, I turned around and looked forward, possibly even hoping to clear the thought of the fighter jet out of my memory altogether.

But now the jet flew over the car and began to land maybe twenty or thirty meters away from the car. It was hovering and descending like a helicopter would. The jet was huge. Its back end was kind of strange, with maybe four jets coming off the back end, in a horizontal row. The jets were like rounded rectangles.

The jet released one huge blast of air from its jets. I thought -- I may even have "explained" to my cousin/brother! -- that the blast was like a little cushion of air to help the jet land softly. But the blast was so strong that it actually began pushing the car backwards. The few cars around us didn't seem to be affected.

The car kept moving backward. It didn't seem like it would stop. I now knew that the jet had made the blast of air expressly to get this car moving, and that it would probably keep the car moving. The jet, which may have stayed landed, was now also above us.

The jet again blasted us with air, causing us to move backwards under its direction, maybe even taking a few turns along the road. Other cars around us -- there were a lot more, now -- were driving forward, in a normal flow of traffic, not unaware of us, but not more aware of us than they would be of any other cars on the street.

The jet now somehow lifted us up off the road. We may have been lifted with a blast of air. But the blast of air, I thought to myself, if it was a blast of air, was now acting like a tractor beam. The car was flown over some buildings, then over a densely packed area of buildings that were maybe four or five stories tall. It was like all the roads were gone, and like now all there were were buildings. But I felt like I was just in some "back area," like an alleyway, or a secret entrance area for all these buildings.

At some point during all of this, the car began moving forward instead of being pulled backward. The jet may now have been gone. My brother/cousin may also have been gone, or I may simply have been less aware of him.

I was directed to a building-sized hole set into a cluster of buildings. Something about this hole reminded me of a multi-story parking garage. But it was very dark and shadowy, and something about its edges seemed more like the walls of a demolished building, or the gaping maw of a monster. Red-painted metal tracks, like the tracks of a modern high-speed roller coaster, came twisting up out of the abyss. My car was directed to and then linked up with the tracks.

I knew, or at least assumed, that the tracks would lead down into some government building. As I'd suspected, I thought, the government had brought me here. I coasted along the twists and turns of the track, always heading toward the black abyss, but never seeming to reach it.

I was a bit apprehensive. I reflected that I didn't know whether I was being brought here by the government for a good or bad reason. Did the government want me because they felt I had some kind of special talent? Or did they want me because they felt like I was involved with some kind of heinous crime. I knew that if they thought I was involved with a crime, they'd probably torture me.

Even though I knew I hadn't been involved with anything bad, I assumed I was probably being brought here to be tortured. I wasn't afraid of the pain as much as I was afraid that, in pain, I would embarrass myself by acting weak and screaming and crying.

Dream #2

I was sitting at "my office," which was a big, unfinished room filled with natural light. The room felt like the side room of a large house, or like some long, narrow room in a basement. The floors were probably linoleum tile. The walls were really tall, tall as walls in a mansion. But they had a cheap look to them. Windows ran all along the top of the wall to my left, letting in dazzling beams of white-gold sunlight.

I sat at the left corner of a long table. The table was like a mix between a trading desk and a lunchroom table. My computer -- possibly an old, clunky, 1980s style computer, and possibly a phone, were the only things on the desk.

I sat before the computer and spoke on the phone. I was probably running down some sort of call list that I had on my screen. I had just managed to get a hold of some insurance agency that was listed at the bottom of my screen. The insurance agency's name was the same as the last name of the owner. Something about that name seemed really familiar to me.

A woman picked up the phone and answered with her name. I recognized the woman's first name and the woman's voice. She was MM, a client of mine from a job I'd been laid off from four years ago. She had simply taken on her married name while she was working at this insurance office, which she and her husband ran together.

Happy to speak with MM again, I said who I was, asked MM if she remembered me, and asked how she was doing. I never really heard MM's voice responding to me. But I knew she had now probably asked why I was at the job I was at, and what kind of work I was doing.

I pushed myself backward, away from my desk, and then forward and off to my right, toward the exit from this room, on something like a mix between an office chair and a skateboard. All this time I was still talking on a phone, which may have been a cord-bound, landline phone.

I kind of skirted the issue of why I was working at this new job, though now that MM had brought up the question of why, I now felt a little ashamed of the fact that I was working here. Instead, I explained what the job was.

Apparently, I was something like the first line of attack in a collections agency, or something like that. When people were in financial trouble with a company that had loaned them money or given them credit, the people were sent over either to me or to my company. I then had the job of calling these people and telling them that their credit was in trouble.

This, I'm pretty sure, was all I was supposed to do. The people who had been notified and who had accepted the information were then routed to some kind of credit repair or debt collection place. Somehow I earned money for each person I'd spoken with who had accepted the fact that they needed to start work on the first stages of whatever process they would then be put through.

I had an image of a call list for my job. It seemed to be like an Excel spreadsheet. But it seemed to be written on paper, in bright, red crayon, and possibly in a childlike scrawl. I tried to explain to MM that felt like this was a really good business to be in, and that I could make a lot of money from it, even though I myself was beginning to have doubts about that.

As I continued speaking with MM, I was wheeling myself into a different room, with cheap wood-paneled walls and thin, grey carpet.  I wheeled myself up to a long, wooden desk, like the sales desk of some old merchandise shop, and then out into a larger, office-like area of the room, through a waist-high, swinging door.

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