sleeping dreams

[randomdreams]

I dreamed I was working for a circuit board fabrication company. The president was Darth Vader. The director of HR was Princess Leia. DV kept hiring jerks who would sexually harass Leia, and then she'd fire them and yell at DV, who would hold his helmeted head in his hands.
I was doing board layout. We had this meter-by-two-meter sheet of glass, and I'd draw the individual conducting traces onto the glass, by dipping my fingertip in a vase that looked like a volumetric flask, filled full of glycerine and aluminum powder, and as I traced across the glass it would (if I remembered to turn the power on) draw a perfect thin straight conductive trace. If I forgot, it would just be this big smudgy shiny grease smear. We had a board that was bigger than the glass, so we clamped a book on one side and I drew over onto the book, but the trace wouldn't attach across the boundary. The entire company was housed in a semi-abandoned summer camp, and I personally worked in a giant barn with no walls (and birds flying around in it) so every time the wind came up, which seemed to be constantly, it would blow all my design notes away. There were big canopies I could pull down on the sides to shelter it somewhat but it took two people and every time I went looking for someone to help me all I found was Leia yelling at DV.

Comments

[secretagentmoof]

"semi-abandoned"? Jason was head of marketing or something?

[randomdreams]

I say 'semi-abandoned' because families were renting some of the cabins, while we were trying to make do with the main buildings.

[eub]

Glycerine and aluminum powder. You know what glycerine and aluminum powder needs, some potassium permanganate.

[randomdreams]

That's absolutely true, at least for very short periods of time.
When we were kids, my dad was trying to make a garden in the back yard, which consisted of a sheer sheet of sandstone inclined at about 15 degrees, covered in broken-down sandstone with a bit of dust blown in. This required removing rather a lot of sandstone. I'd drill holes in the sandstone with a star drill and a 3 pound hammer, and then we'd pack them full of KMnO4 and 400 mesh aluminum powder, stick a fuse in, and have at it. Usually it just made a very loud pop, but sometimes it'd fracture the rock.

[eub]

When I was growing up, it was the very tail end of the era still remembered by the chemistry books I had, the era of "buy some potassium permanganate at most drug stores." I'm sure it's long gone, both for explosives reasons and for drugs reasons.

[amaebi]

"Leadville gardening" is growing in my mind now as a metaphor. Not a simple one.

[amaebi]

I think that dream is a splendid metaphor for #MeToo / #TimesUp in the workplace, and your place amid it. For, dear randomdreams, I perceive you as certainly not an active perp in marginalizing women, and minimally a passive one, probably with instances of engaging the patriarchy about it. Though you'd really rather just get on with your work, despite the fraught environment....

[randomdreams]

I worry sometimes that I'm too busy just getting on with my work. Silence is a type of complicity.
But then again, I also think my brain is just byzantine in how it represents and deals with stress.

[amaebi]

Silence is a form of complicity, but one can't always be narrating the active social paradigms. Even if one had time and energy, it would just be treated as an irritant.

[sistawendy]

Your dreams are the hands-down best. You could be making all this up and nobody would care.

[randomdreams]

Well, in a way, I am, right? I'm dubious my subconscious has actual themes, and I'm even more dubious that my waking-up recollections are anything more than rationalizations and forced narratives gleaned from a big pile of random images.