Recently I had another one of those dreams about an abnormally-huge building.
I dreamed I was walking by the side of a road in the Detroit area. There were no distinguishing Detroit landmarks, but I knew where I was. Snow was piled up high everywhere except for the road, and I often had to wade through it in order to stay out of the way of traffic. There were no sidewalks. I had no vehicle, no money and no place to go.
The first building I looked at more more closely was very large, but not abnormally so. I went in through a loading bay and saw that it was a warehouse holding second-hand clothes. The used clothes made a surprising contrast with the new, generic-industrial-park exterior of the building.
Walking further along the road, I passed two buildings which had been abandoned and were beginning to crumble. The first had once been a large bank in the middle of its parking lot, with several lanes for drive-through traffic.
The next building harder to identify. It was several stories high, it high white aluminum siding which was discolored in patches.
And then I came to the abnormally-large building. There were cars in its parking lot, new ones. I walked through an entrance with two sets of automatically-sliding glass doors. The place looked like a hospital, except that I couldn't see any signs pointing to this department and that. A lot of people were bustling about, but the rooms were so huge that the place was not at all crowded.
I walked through one high-ceiling after another, continuing to see many people and no signs. I also didn't notice any ID cars/security keys.
Most of the rooms were very monochrome: all the walls of each room were the same color, with large, expensive-looking sculptures always exactly matching the color of the walls. I was reminded of those men's suits with jacket, shirt, tie and trousers all exactly the same color. My initial impression was that I found the decor unimpressive. My second thought was that the amount of work which had gone into this whole huge interior, the amount of thought and planning, was impressive. The ambition was impressive whatever one thought of the finished product.
Eventually my presence was noticed. Instead of being briskly shown back outside into the deep snow, as I expected, everyone was very friendly and very nice. People asked about my circumstances, and I honestly replied that I was homeless and broke. People asked whether I was hungry and tired, I said yes to both questions. After being handed a faux-leather pouch stuff very full of 20-, 50- and 100-dollar bills, and then given a nice faux-leather backpack to carry the pouch, just because it was too big to fit into any of my pockets, I was given a very nice meal, and then shown a very nice room, and told it was mine. It contained a big bed, a big desk, its own big bathroom with a really huge shower, and just lots and lots of room and nice furnishing.
The next day, I was told that the director wanted to speak with me. I told myself that this might be where I found the big catch to all of this nice stuff. Like maybe that this was a cult, and I'd never leave the place alive.
The director's appearance did not immediately allay the cult suspicions: Like the ground-floor rooms, his attire was monochrome, but more like that of the villain in a 1950's sci-fi movie than a more recent fashionable man's suit. The director was tall and wiry, with blonde hair and blue eyes.
"What have you been thinking about?" he asked me.
"Andre Gorz," I replied, "and the necessity of changing from economic to ecological thinking."
"You agree with Gorz about that?"
"Absolutely," I said.
"I agree too," the director said. "But there are a lot of difficult details to be worked out."
I finally just asked straight-out what had been puzzling me the whole time: "What is this place?"
"A left-wing think tank."
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