Dreams

As a result of my unemployed state, I am doing a lot more (read: a healthy amount) of sleeping, and thus a lot more dreaming. I had one the other night where I kicked a really scrawny guy's ass. That was pretty satisfying.

Last night I had this surreal dream about a huge factory that everyone called "The Mill". (not to be confused with a hippie hangout bar in Iowa City called The Mill) It was astronomically huge, and scary. The air was dark around it all the time, because there was so much smoke fuming out of its stacks that it blotted out the sun. The factory was as big as a city, and the workers' lives completely revolved around it in cultlike fashion. The people that worked there almost seemed unhuman, less intellegent and more animal-like than regular people. Like zombies or robots or something. Also like a cult, everything about The Mill was shrouded in mystery, even its location. I glimpsed it far off in the distance, and once closer, during the dream, but I never saw the whole thing - I could only imagine the size of this ferocious industrial wasteland. I was doing some kind of research on it, but had trouble finding any information. I went to the house of an old man that had something to do with the mill, or used to, and he wouldn't come to the door, then finally came out of the house screaming, not even seeming to know we were there. I think he threw his telephone at us when we approached him, though. Anyway, I went to find out more, and found a river, very near The Mill, where workers were doing some sort of task. They were calling the river "The Mill" so I got really confused, I would ask where the Mill was, and they were like, "you're here." They were teaching kids (and me) how to move from rapid to rapid in the river without being pulled under. It looked benign, but they told me about the hidden dangers the currents could hold, and I started to get nervous about being in the water. I thought it was kind of fun moving from rock to rock, but they treated it as serious business, as survival. I began to think they were right.

My feeling towards the workers was odd, because though I thought their existence was bleak and mysterious, I felt this urge to join them. I felt like I was on the outside of everything, and wanted to be let in. I was held at an arm's distance from everything, and never allowed to see The Mill in full horrifying view. Even the old man, screaming, with thin skin over brittle bones, seemed to have an intelligence, knowledge, that I would never be privy to, some kind of mystical truths that I hadn't dug deep enough to find.

I wish I could convey to you a picture of the Mill itself, because it was so awe-inspiring - so many smokestacks, tubes and metal bits everywhere, in infinite detail, but on a huge scale. I've always been mystified by industrial scenes, like you see when you ride on a train - there's motion and heat and colossal size, but there seems to be no human life, or life of any kind, anywhere in sight.