reassuring prince

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I may have been working, standing amid aisles of shelves, like shelves in a store. There were a few other people with me. There were one wall of shelves and display racks and then a series of aisles perpendicular to the wall. I stood staring at the wall of shelves. Something like clear, plastic packets full of papers and study materials hung from the display racks on the wall.

We had to do something like sort papers or make sure that papers were in the right places. This all may have had to do with studies we were doing for reports, like dissertations, each of us was writing. But one of my co-workers thought he had put one of the papers in the wrong place. He was now completely upset and panicking.

I knew that the panicking co-worker was the pop artist Prince. I went to go talk to him, to assure him that everything was alright. I turned away from the wall and walked down one of the aisles. I then turned left and up another aisle, the shelves of which were full of salty snacks, like potato chips and onion rings. Prince was just walking down the aisle. He had long, black, disheveled hair and a thin mustache. He wore a purple bodysuit with a steep, v-necked, lapeled collar that opened all the way down to his sternum.

I knew what Prince had done. I knew he'd thought he'd organized something in an incorrect way. He probably had organized something in an unusual way. But he hadn't necessarily done it the wrong way. I called out to Prince, telling him to calm down, that everything was cool.

I held out my fist, so Prince could tap his fist's knuckles against mine, to show me he understood he was cool. I noticed that Prince had a gold ring on his middle finger. The design of the ring was a gold disc with an upward-pointing pentagram inside of it.

I was now off to the left of the aisles, past an empty gap of floor space, kneeling at the end cap of another aisle. On a low shelf was a tray of meats and cheeses. I picked up some slices of turkey. I tried to pick up slices of Swiss cheese as well. But the slices were so stuck together that I could only tear off fragments. I began laying the fragments down on the slices of turkey. I was going to roll the cheese and turkey together and eat these little turkey roll-ups.

As I did this I could hear someone like a supervisor speaking from the far end of the aisles. The supervisor (probably a woman, but maybe a man) was telling everybody that if they'd done interviews with professors from universities, they were not to treat the paperwork from those interviews the same as if the paperwork for the interviews with people in commercial fields. This had something to do with the fact that professors were, for my co-workers, more than just interview subjects. They were also potential professional contacts.

But someone was continuing to put the professor paperwork into stacks with other paperwork, even as the supervisor was talking. The supervisor kept repeating, "Keep the paperwork separate! Keep the paperwork separate!" The supervisor's voice became more and more insistent. It was like the supervisor was getting more and more urgent and annoyed, but also like the supervisor was becoming more and more convinced that the person working was really too stupid to understand the command.

I felt bad for the person getting chastised. I knew the person wasn't stupid. I even had the feeling that the person was actually doing things correctly. I thought the supervisor may have been too impatient to see that the worker was following directions, just in a different way.