Fresh Kills _ Dream - Day 7

Dream - Day 7

I slept, no I dreamed all night. What is night here?

It is definitely another time period.  Time of sorts moves here too but on what scale of measurement I have not a clue.

I was briefly in the lobby of the World Trade Center, the south tower.  No doubt a symbolic place to exit from the building.

Strange dream.

Why can’t I get out of that building?

I am sitting and orientating my work at a desk.  I am beginning to realize that one of the causes of my death checked off in boxes on a NYC death certificate form should also have the cause as “Workaholic”.

If I had not been habitually thirty minutes early for work to put things in order, make coffee etc., I would not have been where I was when the plane hit me dead on.

I might have been in the lobby waiting to get on an elevator.  Why didn’t I use my flex time more wisely?

In fact, I have bragged for years that I was a workaholic.  Something so ungenerous we Americans are to ourselves is the denying ourselves a few minutes here and there.  I few hours here and there for an extended lunch.  A full six weeks of vacation like the Europeans.

In a way, the factory schedule of the world war two war machine has never left America.  Of course, the phrase “Time is money.” is carved in stone on Plymouth Rock I assume etc. Puritans and Puritanism suck big time.

The strange thing about the dream and the lobby thing is that I was going to call home and tell them I was all right.  Who works twenty four hours a day for some gadamn corporation?  Only fools.  And then when you are fifty-five they give you a boot and package that will not leave you solvent until 65 and Social Security.

It is as if they have everything on a spreadsheet down to the last penny in pay and to the last second in time.  No time for coffee.

Of course, it is all paper profit.  Phantom profit.  Having worked in finance everyone knows that the quarterly profit is merely a matter of opinion.

And if a company actually pays a dividend anymore, it is just some temporary loan from Big Bank paying the dividend.  It’s all a Ponzi scheme.

When America made automobiles, your work unit produced eight and a quarter Oldsmobiles per shift. If you came up short, the supervisor and the line manager figured out quick why you came out short.  These days, a dozen consultants and three months later they will figure out or do a report on why you came up short on cars during one shift at the factory three months ago. Pure bullshit.

Management piled on top of management and they call it business.  Why not get back into building something real like cars instead of jerking off on computers all day long and call that production on some corporate spreadshit?

Strange dream.

The lights are on in the lobby.  They were reflecting off the white marble veneers and stainless steel polished trims.  Darkness and night outside

Strange what I clearly remember about the lobby.  There were people moving about.  Only a few.  It was night after all.  And they were coming and going but I did not see any faces.  I saw one or two faces. Strangers. They were asking me business questions about my job, my productivity. I assumed they were management above me since they asked the questions.

Cannot remember what the matter was about.  But somehow I got stuck with some detail.  I was walking back and forth between lobbies.  One World Trade Center was full of those counters for airline tickets and rental cars.  Two World Trade Center is pretty much empty except for the tourists that crowd the lobby in day time wanting to buy tickets to the observation deck way up high.

In a way, I think I was trying to get back up to my office which I think, no, I know is no longer there.

The task that I had been assigned to has to do with shipping two coffins that had somehow been misplaced in the corner of one of the lobbies.  Nobody seemed to know where to ship them.  The paperwork attached to these objects in transit somehow got lost.

Then it struck me that my office was in the lobby in the dream and what was left of it in reality too, sat there after the collapse of the building.  Strange the lobby looked so pristine and perfect, almost as if it was the first day official day of business on April 4, 1973.

In fact, not being a native New Yorker, having come here in 1978, the lobby was as I remembered it. I am color blind but I think the wall to wall carpeting in the lobbies was a sky blue.  That and white marble and light streaming in on an afternoon sun into number two’s lobby often evoked the feeling of walking amongst clouds. The carpet pile was so thick and the steps of walking were cushioned a bit like walking on air. 

We had moved to Arizona for a number of years and then moved back to this city.  They had changed the color of carpet to some sort of dark mauve.  It was never the same to me walking through the lobbies.  That and even before we left, they had built a hotel that blocked that afternoon sun in Two’s lobby. 

I was perhaps looking at the ideal, my ideal impression of the building, from an ideal in time.  The only thing wrong was that there was no sunlight.  It was night outside these lobbies.  The eternal night of death?

And the paperwork on the two coffins? Symbolism perhaps?  But why two?  There was only me that I knew of.

And again I sensed to know that besides the normal forty or so days of separation between death and the hereafter there was some sort of snafu in the paperwork of myself and somebody else lost in the bureaucratic hell of here.

Snafu meant that I might be staying here indefinitely.

Two other things.

My dream was in a loop.  Parts of it got repeated over and over again.  I wondered when I was alive why you get stuck in scenes of a dream and play it over and over again.  Is it obsessive compulsive disorder? Does life imprint, transfer over into death.  I wonder.

In a way, the dream is over.  You are tired and stay asleep.  Your desire to explore here in a dream world is limited.  You may wish to dream all but the program or the programing of content of that night’s dream is allotted in the brain.

Maybe dreaming is a healthy sportful, thoughtful exercise.  But too much of anything is not necessarily a good thing.

And the other thing with faces.  Cannot remember the faces of my loved ones.  Cannot remember the details of that other life.

Was being a workaholic, did that answer the question?  Did I work to escape the responsibilities of home life?

No answer.

No quality time at home.  No quality memories of it in death?

No.  That is not the answer.  But what is?

In a way I start to remember dreams from when I was living.

In those dreams, there were faceless people too.  In fact when I dreamed about my father or mother, now deceased, they were so like Arabic art, faceless.

I sensed their presence in dreams but in retrospect, I was really alone in those dreams with moving mannequins populating the stage of my dreams and giving and taking along some theme and dialogue.  But I was the star of my own stage production in each dream.  I was alone on stage in those dreams?

Alone. We seem to be born alone.  Live alone much of the time?  Dream alone.  Die alone.

Was it all an illusion?  Was that other life? That so-called real life?  Was that the real thing?  Or is reality this dream?