Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Precognitive Dream

Wednesday, May 1, 1985

On Wednesday morning I had a dream in which I was in a room with a girl who had built a strange contraption out of a telephone, vacuum cleaner, and typewriter. The girl was on my left. Two young gray-suited businessmen came into the room. They were on my right. They tried to convince me to buy the machine. I could see that the machine was moving, but I did not understand its utility. I decided the machine would not be useful to me.

When I awakened from that dream I could not see how it related to any recent experiences or anything I had been thinking about. The dream seemed surreal and out of place in an otherwise normal night of dreaming.

I was a programmer for a large international corporation. On Thursday my boss unexpectedly asked me to represent the systems development group at a meeting with our operations manager and salesmen from another company. The meeting was outside of my normal job responsibilities and I was apprehensive. I entered the meeting room and felt a rush of deja vu. The operations manager was on my left and two young men wearing gray suits were on my right. The two young men explained how this piece of software they wanted to sell us would solve our remote printing problems. They ran a demonstration of the software and the demonstration failed. The men explained that the software had been written in BASIC by one of their company's customers and was not yet perfected. I did not understand the details of how the software was supposed to handle the remote printing problems we had not been able to solve internally. The men were unable to explain the details in a way that made sense to me. I recommended to my boss that we not buy the software.

The more I thought about the dream and the meeting, the more amazed I was at the warning my subconscious had given me. I was going to be in a stressful situation outside my comfort zone, and my boss was relying on my judgement for the whole programming group. It would have been detrimental to my self-esteem and to my credibility within the group if I had recommended software that would not work for us.

Similarities between the dream and the meeting included the following:
four person meeting,
two young men wearing gray suits on my right,
fourth person in room was on my left ,
the young men were salesmen,
the product demonstration showed no useful results,
the salesmen could not explain how the product worked,
the product had been built by a third party,
my feeling of apprehension and confusion,
both devices dealt with communications and printing,
both devices sucked. (grin)

Copyright 2007 Jon Maloney

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