Dream d484-s: Other People Were Working Too

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Dreamer had rented a desk in a shared workspace. Not a room. A desk. One of twelve in an open floor plan on the second story of a converted warehouse, with exposed brick and pendant lamps and the smell of other people's coffee. The desk was large enough for the prints if we overlapped them slightly at the corners, which the Dreamer allowed for the first time, and the sequence lay in a rough grid, four rows of eleven, with the remaining images in a short fifth row that stopped where someone else's laptop cable crossed the table.

Other people were working. A woman at the next desk typed steadily, her screen reflected in the window behind her. Two men at a table near the door spoke in low voices over a blueprint. Someone in the far corner took a phone call and walked to the stairwell, and the door closed behind them with a soft mechanical click.

Roberto circulated. He moved between the desks with the ease of an animal who had been in many rooms and treated all of them as his own. He walked under the woman's desk and she did not notice. He sat briefly on the blueprint table and the two men shifted their papers without looking at him. He was invisible to everyone except us, or he was visible and unremarkable, and I could not tell which was stranger.

Lano stayed under our desk. He pressed against my feet and watched the room from floor level, his eyes tracking movement, his body calm in the way it was calm when a space was safe but not his. Other people's shoes passed. He let them.

"This is the last test," the Dreamer said. They kept their voice at the volume of the room, which was the volume of work, of people concentrated on things that were not this. "Can the sequence hold when no one in the room cares about it?"

I looked at the prints. The ceremony fire sat in its grid square, surrounded by the underground entrance, the coast road, the stranger's staircase. The woman typed. The men murmured. No one looked at our table. The sequence lay open in a room full of people doing other things, and it did not diminish. The images held their charge. The gaps between them held their third meanings. The fire burned in its square inch of paper while someone three desks away ate an apple and checked their email.

"It does not need attention to exist," the Dreamer said. "It needs attention to be received. But it exists whether anyone receives it or not. That is what you have made. Something that is there when no one is looking."

Roberto completed his circuit of the room and returned to our desk. He jumped onto the table edge and sat at the corner of the grid, not on any image, just at the border of the sequence, facing outward, watching the room the way he had once watched the archive basement, the cinema, the courtyard. Every space was the same to him. Every space was a place where the work either held or did not.

Lano shifted under the desk and rested his chin on my shoe. The woman finished typing and stood and left. Her desk was empty now. The sequence continued to exist beside the space where she had been, indifferent to her absence, indifferent to her presence, simply there, on a rented desk, in a room that did not belong to it, holding everything it held.