The Red Umbrella (October 2022)

It stopped right there and he abruptly sat upright at his desk trying to catch hold of some part of the evanescence—even if only a few sensations or images—of another fleet-footed daydream. This one was longer than most, or at least it seemed that way. Usually, there's no way to time a dream, but since he was at work and his interaction with the computer was monitored, it must have been less than a minute. Incredible! So much packed in so little time. If only he could recall something he could use to reconstruct the dream.

Fragments were all that remained—a red umbrella, an ever-growing task list, and excitement. Whatever the story was, it had been compelling. He sensed that. Up to the very end when it slipped right out of his mind's grasp. Just a red umbrella, an endless list of assignments and a sense of ... well, it almost felt like an adventure, not that he'd had many of those.

He typed a quick response to the latest email and then tossed around the idea of a red umbrella to see if it connected with anything else. Rain! There was no rain! He couldn't understand why someone—and he couldn't see who because the huge, red parabloid swallowed the person down to their (sing.) knees. How could he forget such a queer-shaped umbrella, especially—and this was just coming back to him—since there was no rain. At least no one else was carrying an umbrella. And there were a lot of people ... in an open field that didn't seem to have any particular significance. They were gray shadows—the people—no distinguishing features. Vague silhouettes of human form.

He couldn't see himself in the dream but he knew he was the main character and that everything that happened was 'observed' by him. He couldn't recall any of the specific duties he'd been tasked with but he 'felt' overwhelmed—he remembered this—as if submerged by a great swell of administrivia.

Another email—marked 'Urgent.' Just a routine message, so he copied and pasted a reply and sent it away. He gasped for air.

Miley, in one of the adjacent cubes, whispered loudly, "Hey, what's going on. You OK?"

"Yeah," he answered. "Just thought I'd missed a deadline. No worries." An impish emoticon appeared on his monitor, winked and disappeared.

What was that all about?

No new messages. He struggled to work his way back into the dream—a large red umbrella and a tidal surge of 'to dos.'

What the hell? There's gotta be more. What's the adventure? Was I searching for something? Going somewhere? Planning to do something? What was it? And why do I have the feeling that there is something worth remembering?

An open field, crowded with people. One large red umbrella but no rain. An impossible workload. None of that seemed particularly interesting and worth trying to recover.

Two notifications popped up: a 4:15 deadline for submitting the final review of the Kindler & Gentry proposal and a 4:45 deadline for the daily performance report. The proposal was 400-plus pages of technical gobbledygook—mostly repetitive nonsense and the whole thing could be reduced to twenty five or so pages of well-written and intelligible prose. That would be the deluge, but floods of bureaucratic waste were a recurrent motif in his dreams ... and life.

What could be the damned adventure?

Would he have to keep dreaming until another adventure dream came along? Problem was, most of the dreams vanished without leaving a hint or a thread or a trace. Nothing to follow. This one, he'd thought he'd been ready for, but now it, too, seemed to be evaporating as his mind was forced back into the myriad runnels of his work routine.

Miley has a red rain slicker, doesn't she? Says that's what people wear Down East.