Dreamovie 73

I am on a dock that extends out from a beach. Its far end is sinking into the water. As I walk out onto the dock, a woman whom I only marginally know hands me a printed flyer. It is a long piece of white paper with a haiku written on the bottom of it, and it carries the additional message "There's no second time for your first love." The idea behind the flyer is that we fall in love only once for the first time so we should hold onto that love. The woman thinks this has something to do with the two of us. I consider how to respond and decide that I won't respond directly by telling her I don't know her. Instead, I decide I'll note to her that even a person first in love isn't necessarily in love with a person first in love with him or her—that we weren't each other's first loves. As I consider what to say, I walk out to the end of the dock, where my feet are in the water. The woman's boyfriend comes to me to argue that I should stay away from her, so I tell him how I plan to extract myself from that situation.

Afterwards, I wade a little bit away from the dock, into deeper water where a wharf turns to make a right angle. I stand there inside that corner with the water above my waist so that I can present a little workshop. Though it doesn't become clear what the subject of the workshop is, the event is being run by Dan W and Jennifer H-K, so I assume it has something to do with poetry. Michael is at the workshop, though I don't know if he's one of the attendees or helping present the workshop. As I start, I am interrupted by a woman who explains that she has bought genealogy software to make the charts. Our topic is not genealogy, but apparently we have some need to create charts for our work. I explain to her that genealogy software can make charts, but only of a narrow kind. I then explain how such software can so a number of things, including store data on individuals and copies of documents related to those people.

I am driving down a city street. I see a group of kids standing around near a blocky building that is supposedly where I'm going. Inside that building, I find a number of people, including Ray and Dianne, planning a conference of local government records managers. It is not clear if our meeting is associated with the workshop I was just working on or with the spring conference of this organization.

I leave the city that I'm in and take a rocket into space with three other people. We are in a 1960s space capsule, and we are already in space circling the globe. There are three people outside the capsule and can't return because opening the hatch will release all the air from the capsule. Two of the people outside are somehow making their way safely back to earth. One woman remains by the capsule. She and I talk to each other while we look at each other through the porthole. She insists that she cannot return to earth and that she cannot reenter the capsule, so I ask her how to get the capsule back to earth. I don't know what she tells me to do, if anything, or what happens to her.

Somehow I return to earth and am walking the streets of a small city in the direction of the same blocky building I visited earlier. I am recently back on the planet and I'm famous for my adventure. People have begun to write accounts of these experiences of mine. As I walk wherever I'm going, I plan in my head how to write this story myself. When I turn down one street, I either see people I know or people who know of me everywhere.

A woman and I are driving in a van out of the city, and I pass a billboard, though I don't know what the billboard says. Soon, we are driving down the road at the edge of the countryside, and there is a cemetery on the road just before our turn. I turn into that cemetery and we apparently visit it. Soon we return to the road and turn right at the very next road and then immediately left into the parking lot of the building. We have a meeting there to plan the conference. At the end of the meeting, each of us receives a pen and pencil eraser, at the cost of 60¢ apiece. The organization, apparently, pays for these believing it is buying these on the cheap. The erasers are in a warehouse and we receive them one by one through a service window. A man inside the warehouse works on this project with a man who is our leader. As this process continues, I work out something (the costs of something? a poem?) on a whiteboard just to the right of the service window.

Later, the woman and I are driving back to this same spot. Just at the cemetery, while we're waiting in line, a brunette woman we know approaches the van and asks for a ride, but she doesn't open the door quickly so I open the front door. My companion asks me if I'm inviting her into the front seat with her. I explain that I'm just trying to talk to the woman to tell her to get in the car. Once she gets in, we drive back to the building with the warehouse. There we continue to work on the conference planning, but it's only the three of us now. The brunette says that the only topic she can speak on at the conference is exercising. I note that there had been a session a few years earlier about how good health was important to good records management, so I suggest she continue to work on that idea.

I am in a building, not sure which, with someone who has not received an eraser, so I promise to help the person get one. We drive to the blocky building in the city, where I explain to the man in the warehouse that we still had erasers to pick up for people in the organization. I try to explain my authority to pick up the erasers by mentioning the man he has worked with previously, but I have to explain that I've forgotten his name even though—I say this, but I'm exaggerating—"he's my best friend." The man not only gives me the erasers for this one person, he also offers me all of the other erasers we'll need. At first I don't want to take them, but I realize that we can distribute them easily enough at meetings.