Dream of a Job Like a Family

In this dream, I had a job interview at a family-run print shop. The daughter was my friend; she had long, mouse-brown hair and glasses, and she’d cut the heels off the backs of her flip-flops. I imagined her feet being very calloused as she walked all around the print shop like this and her family lovingly ridiculed her. I waited in the kitchen to be interviewed, listened to the presses in the next room, and started to feel the enormous emotional weight that was attached to this job. The previous interviewee made his exit, and he was much younger than me, and more flashily dressed. I realized I was the one they were going to hire and began to relax.

The father was a very nice man who provided a strong sense of unity. There was something sinister about this,* but not sinister enough to prevent me from wanting to work there. Once I’d been hired, we all decided to go for a walk and then a drive. On the walk, I saw that the tips of every branch of every tree had been carved into a knobbish little head with comical features and gaping wide eyes. I pretended not to notice, and when it became clear this had been the work of the daughter, I was glad I’d kept my ignorance hidden.

On the drive, we were moving through mountainous streets, somehow magically past deadlocked traffic. The car felt like it might leave the earth in that way cars sometimes do when they’re climbing a hill and then dipping. I saw an animal: a wild boar I thought, and I remarked on it. The car was filled with laughter as everyone corrected me and I saw that they were right: the animal was really a black goat. This time I was sorry I’d let my ignorance show, and I tried to change the subject back to boars: “Do you have them around here? What are they called, javelinas?”

*This dream was probably influenced by the documentary miniseries The Staircase, directed by Jean Xavier de Lestrade, which had been present in my mind.