Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Corporate dream

Scene: Large, cold room with yellowing walls, the smell of disinfectant in the air.

I am walking back to my seat with a file containing briefings on my new client. But my boss is sitting at the head of the room, looking more like an exam proctor than a project manager. This is my "office", I think, nothing more than a large computer lab. I sit down in my swivel chair (God knows I'd always wanted one as a kid) and turn towards my computer screen, my hand instinctively grabbing for the mouse.

But the screen looks different - large, white and oval-shaped, with liquid collecting at the bottom - Wait, I'm sitting in front of a urinal. I realize that the lab is really a toilet, rows of urinals with swivel chairs before them.

I get up, matter-of-fact. So this lab's busy. I'll go to the one upstairs. A voice in my head says, "That's a different department. What if that's busy too?" I know I can log in there, I've been here long enough to use other department labs. I step out into the hallway.

There are children everywhere. They are crowding the hallway at the foot of the stairs I need to take. So it's break-time, that's why the labs are turning into toilets, I think. But I'm sure there's at least one computer available in the upstairs lab...though I don't know what happens there during break-time.

I sidle past the children, a towering, swashbuckling man among a bunch of starry-eyed kids, staring at me in the wonderment of seeing someone go upstairs, a place strictly forbidden to them. I wink and smile at one little girl with grey eyes before lunging up the steps three at a time. She giggles and whispers to her friend.

But I grow more circumspect as I'm out of sight of the kids. The staircase brings me out onto a hallway that looks more like a coal mine than an office building. The floor is covered in slate-colored sludge, and the columns holding up the roof are rough-hewn lignite pillars. And behind those pillars is the large hall that was once the computer lab.

There are rows of niches instead of cubicles, but no human occupants. The niches contain what look like gargoyles suckling out of the wall. Their backs to me, these statues seem to be carved out of, and feeding on, the same material that the room is made of, and the impression is that of pigs at a trough. "Oh," I think, "the experiments." It's then that the floor under me gives way.

The sludge dissolves like quicksand, and a gasp escapes me as I grope for a hold. And slowly, one of the gargoyles down the hall comes alive. About 4 feet tall, it is shaped like a tyrannosaur with a triceratops head. But it is fast, and runs with an almost human gait, its jaws open and its unseeing eyes fixated on my moving arm.

Just then, a shout like a thunderbolt rings out, echoes killed by the sludge around. But the spell has taken effect, and the gargoyle freezes with a startled expression, its jaws melted shut within inches of my fingers. I turn to look at my savior for help, but before I can catch more than a glimpse, I feel his spell hit me. But I know who he is. It's my boss.

I fall right through the floor, Prince-of-Persia style, into a dark chasm filled with spikes. But I'm not hurt, as I have grabbed a spike in each hand, and am hanging in mid-air.

That's when I wake up sweating. I grasp desperately at every visual in the dream, binding it, nailing it down in my memory to recount elsewhere. I think of the chilling dream sequence from the movie Being Cyrus, and the memory of Dimple Kapadia's face makes me sweat even more. It's a full hour before I can go back to sleep and to another dream of death.

Your thoughts: 5

Anonymous Anonymous said...

who is the grey eyed girl?

12:06 PM  
Blogger palamoor-poragadu said...

[...]rows of urinals with swivel chairs before them.[...] that's no dream, that's reality put to words!

Except that it is less stronger sensually and smells more like a strong raspberry table cleaner liquid, with interspersed wafts of 100% coffee for added effect.

Wish you better dreams.

10:24 PM  
Blogger Random Walker said...

Not trying to psychoanalyse but how much of it can be attributed to current conditions?

11:57 PM  
Blogger Gandaragolaka said...

Actually, it makes me wonder if there is a kind of office space that would be acceptable to every person on this planet.

Getting into a corporate job these days is like an arranged marriage... you think you are going to hate yourself for marrying this woman, and you know what, after marriage, you will hate yourself for marrying that woman.

7:36 AM  
Blogger Sketchy Self said...

Thanks for leaving a comment on the demented half of my brain. Current conditions or not, it is definitely attributable to an untimely drink of tea at our famous local cafe, Pangaea :D

qnqzzwlh

8:48 AM  

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