I dreamed that my Mom was alive and was driving me cross-country through the rural Midwest. COVID didn't exist For some reason I decided to get out of the car and walk although it was raining and cold and I had no money on my person. I wasn't upset with Mom, that wasn't the reason I got out of the car. Very soon, because of the poor weather and having no cash, I felt rather silly for having gotten out of the car.
After walking for a mile or so I came to a group of buildings. One of them had a very large open entrance with people streaming in and out, and I went in. The place was bustling with people dressed like me: work jackets, jeans, boots. It didn't seem to occur to anyone that I might not belong there.
There was a large, open-air underground area inside the entrance which looked like a mostly-empty warehouse. Crowds of people were engaged in some sort of meeting here. A passageway framed in timber led further down. Curious, I walked down, and soon it became clear that I was in a coal mine. Coal was everywhere. I walked through a large cavern dug through coal. The other people were more and more covered in coal, the further down I went.
I tried to get back out but I was lost, and it took me a long time to find the way back to above ground. People were quite friendly to me, obviously assuming I was just one more miner, and I wanted to get away from there before anyone figured out that I wasn't. At one point, ahead of me, a group of people mounted horses and rode away, throwing long, ominous shadows.
When I got back outside and back to the road, I saw a group of buildings on the other side. I approached them, hoping they were with another organization, not with the mine.
They were part of a progressive Catholic organization which was protesting against the mine and trying to get miners to quit. Some of its members were former miners from the other side of the road.
So what we were doing there -- I was a part of it just about as soon as I arrived -- was successful. But it was vague. We worked together in groups of three or four to a dozen people each, working together on theories. Sort of like postmodern literary theories, except that they dealt with mining instead of literature. As soon as each project was completed, a small paperback volume appeared, and we got paid several dozen dollars each. So there was a modest capitalist motivation alongside the progressive one.
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