I show up for work. It’s a bank environment. I have an idea I’m a few minutes late but just a few.

We work in a small windowless room. It’s a bank but it’s more like a school’s classroom. Only small. There are exactly three of us, at first. Then four. A girl I’m friends with only she’s management. Another girl. And a boss. I sit at the desk closest to the exit. The other girl I don’t know sits far away. And the management girl sits along the other wall. The other two appear to work industriously. It feels like one of those transition days. A day in-between a lot of work. I have this feeling that I’ve recently done a grisly amount of work and that I will, soon, be made to do a lot of work but that for today at least there isn’t a lot of work. There’s a conference in the room with the boss when she arrives. The management girl I know talks with her, the boss, in hushed voices. I understand that I will be let go soon. I expect to hear later that day. But I am not meant to know.

While it all looks and feels like bank work I’ve translated the tasks. My task, my only outstanding task, is to paint a series of paintings. But I’m in a (class)room with no windows and two people who don’t talk and all I’ve got for inspiration are dusty textbooks and it feels like a bank.

The third girl, the girl I don’t know, moves and sits down right ahead of me with the appearance of business. I’m made to understand that she too knows that I’m going to be laid off, probably today. And I can’t make myself feel like painting. The girl I know calls me over to her desk. Is this it? She wants me to look at her still life and compare it to her painting in progress. But I’m suddenly nearly blind or the light is really bad and I can’t compare. I see the two things very differently and it doesn’t help her and it causes me to be very distressed. She’s playing both sides of the fence because we are friends and because she is management.

Rather than return to my desk I decide to take a walk. I walk out into the bank’s office. I am suddenly recognized. I understand I have returned recently but that I worked here earlier. Many people want to talk to me. People I would have expected had long forgotten me. One girl seems particularly happy to see me. But she is also disappointed. “I thought you would have been famous,” she says. “This is the last place I thought I’d see you again,” she adds. She decides we are going to have lunch. Or brunch. She very nearly forces me to join her. I don’t know her in real life but I knew her in my dream. We are having brunch. It’s along an extra wall but still in the bank. Everything is a little odd about the brunch. Example: my coffee is served in a loose cup suspended on a candlestick. My SugarTwin packet, there was only one, was empty when I opened it. When I try to remove the hanging cup, which was not much larger than a thimble, it swings down and spills its limited contents all over the table. But the girl is very friendly. We go out on a balcony for a cigarette.

As we are about to finish, my boss and my management friend, swoop out like hungry darkness onto the balcony. We, myself and the brunching girl, are scolded in front of dozens of people. We are scolded like misbehaving schoolchildren. Instead of stamping out my cigarette and rushing back to work, I continue to smoke during my speech-making. I don’t remember the contents of the speech exactly, except that it was logical and forceful and brilliant without being defensive. I reveal that I know I’m about to be laid off and I have little incentive. I decry their work and the environment as pointless and ill-conceived while offering up much more palatable options. I also say something about making myself available for extra work often and without complaint. When my boss has gone white and quiet and when the crowd of onlookers has become mute, I excuse myself and return to the room. Without having been fired yet, I set to my work. Yes, out of spite, but nonetheless, working.

A new woman comes into the room and asks to speak with me. She asks my boss permission to take me out of the room, which my boss at last begrudges her. I am taken to her corner of the office. It is nondescript except there is what looks like an inflatable beanbag chair. It’s not. That’s my purse, or something, the woman explains. I sit instead on an oddly placed chair. I notice a guardsman with a dog. The guard is standing, looking rather severe, in the front by the main exit. Shall I be killed? Shall I be escorted out? The guardsman points a rifle at me, above me and shoots. A piñata, what was a piñata, explodes directly over my head. Toys and colorful streamers rain down around me.

The woman – I don’t know this woman – explains the toys one by one. This one is a shiny metallic vibrating cord. I say that my dog will have a lot of fun with it. This one is a light that projects directly above it a revolving cube of the primary and secondary colors. It’s fascinating. This light produces a large squared boxing ring not only of light but also of substance. So many party tricks. I understand these gifts are for me. Because of my ongoing fight against the corporation, against menial and insipid work, and against cruel managers. That’s all I remember.

Incidentally, I’m not unaware that the dream, save for myself, was entirely populated by women. How curious.

SS