Dream d466-s: Other Hands at Other Work

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Dreamer had brought the strip to a shared workspace, a long room with six tables and five of them occupied by other people making other things. A woman at the far end was cutting fabric with shears that sounded like a bird taking off. A man near the window was glueing something I could not see, and the sharp vinegar smell of his adhesive mixed with the fixative scent of our prints. Two others sat across from each other, sorting type from a case of metal letters, their fingers clicking against lead.

The Dreamer took the sixth table, nearest the door, and laid the strip across it without ceremony. Our work among other work. No special lighting. No cleared walls. Just a table and the same fluorescent tubes that lit everyone else.

Roberto was not at our table. He was at the fabric cutter's, sitting on the edge of her surface, watching her hands move the shears along a chalked line. She did not seem to mind. She did not seem to notice. He watched the precision of her cut the way he watched the Dreamer's cuts, with the same attention, the same still body.

Lano lay under our table, his chin on my foot. Other people's shoes moved around the room. He tracked them without lifting his head, relaxed enough to stay down, alert enough to know where everyone was.

"This is important," the Dreamer said, arranging the prints in their order. "The work has to exist in a room where it is not the only thing happening. A sequence that needs silence and darkness and a private wall is not finished. A sequence that holds its shape while someone next to you is cutting fabric and someone else is setting type, that is finished."

I looked at our strip on the table. The ceremony fire. The underground entrance. The Wireman's hands. The coast road bend. They lay flat on a table that had gouges and paint stains from years of other projects, and they looked like what they were. Prints on a worktable. Not sacred. Not fragile. Just the result of decisions made over weeks, placed in an order that had arrived through work.

Roberto came back from the fabric table carrying a scrap of cloth in his mouth, a triangle of dark blue. He set it beside the coast road bend and sat back. The Dreamer looked at it.

"Color," they said. "He thinks the sequence needs a color note before the bend."

The fabric cutter glanced over. She saw a scrap of her material on someone else's table and said nothing. She went back to her shears. The room kept working. Lano shifted his weight against my shoe. The strip lay open on the table, unhidden, unprotected, just one more thing being made in a room where making was ordinary.