Today's dream found me wandering through central Indiana. I came across a copy of a small city’s alternative weekly and somehow managed to enter the publication's offices late on a Saturday night. The place was imagined in detail but came down to a large living room and kitchen of an old Victorian, with filing cabinets and the occasional desk and old-fashioned computer monitor. Shaggy, dusty tan carpeting on the floor.
I went to sleep on a cot, and the next morning the place unexpectedly filled up with the staff and their families. It seemed that in the middle of the Midwest people liked to gather in their workplace for Sunday morning community events, in this case potluck brunch. I tried to get on with everyone and be cheerful and bright, since I was an intruder and had turned up looking for a job.
A short, slight young man with a pointed beard, some sort of first among equals on the editorial staff, took me for a tour of the city, again a very detailed scene with more old Victorians. Streets intercut each other, with a tempting one leading up the ridge of a hill. But the young man led me along another and I saw the damage done by a recent fire, with houses still standing but charred and gutted. Then, back at the office, he sat me down at a little lead-colored box with buttons and windows where I’d punch in my answers to an editing test. I thought it would be a matter of choosing the right definitions of words, but no, everything proved more complicated. The box and its system was called Lingo and apparently was familiar in backwoods editorial offices in the Middle West, but I'd never heard of it.
I worried because I’d signed up as a volunteer in the imperial Japanese army. There was a good number of other Westerners, as if Japanese expansion were a popular cause like saving the Spanish Republic. The first assignment was to take a shower, with my stall turning out to be far inside the shower area and hard to track down. Like everyone I’d been given a key ring heavy with keys, but in my case the stall had no keyhole, something I established after minutes of frantically looking about.
I guess stall is the wrong word, since there were no walls and no door, but I had my own showerhead and place to stand. The key was supposed to turn on the water, I suppose. Instead I was left to fake my way through the day without a shower and then try to find someone to consult with. A fellow volunteer, of course, since the Japanese soldiers spoke no English and proved forbidding and unsympathetic. I asked him about planning a trip to Mexico but then realized I’d been there a few years ago and had been so bored that I forgot I ever went. Only when I woke up did I realize that I hadn’t been there in 24 years.