this morning i woke up with the remnants of a very peculiar dream. i was in this type of lecture room with white walls and grayish/slate- colored carpet. there were 4 or 5 levels of stairs rising up against the walls, reminding me of a room that a choir or band would use to practice. anyway, apparently the occasion or topic of the gathering (it wasn’t a class in the traditional sense — more of a club or extracurricular type of meetings) was *THE FUTURE*. the speaker would stand on a pedastal, or a slightly elevated platform and preach the gospel of *THE FUTURE* that hadn’t quite arrived. this future is the one envisioned by artists and pop culture writers of the 50s, that bygone era when “the year 2000″ brought visions of people owning flying cars, domed, gleaming cities on earth and other planets, moving sidewalks, clean cities of glass and metal without so much as a single blade of grass to be seen. so apparently we were a group of visionaries or dreamers or whatever who were slightly perturbed our promised future of flying cars and immaculately-constructed urban settings wasn’t a reality. the speaker would recite ideas or themes of this much-heralded-but-alas-still-as-yet-unarrived future, in a way that was reminiscent of some cheesy beatnik poetry session where the cool daddies and hip cats all snap their fingers in unison after each stanza. so the person addressing the crowd would say things like “bright, gleaming cities!” and the crowd would repeat after every ‘theme’ in unison: BRIGHT, GLEAMING CITIES! i had my turn, and i uttered some similar phrases that pleased the crowd.. it was more like a really strange pep rally than anything else — the crowd was vocally supporting the speaker with every repeated phrase, and became more and more excited with each successive phrase. i believe i said “flying cars!” (crowd: FLYING CAAAARS!!!) and “the golden future!” (the latter brought to the mind’s eye, both mine and everyone in the crowd, it seemed, a vision of the pyramid headquarters where replicants were built and the yellowish, golden sky scene from blade runner). after the session was over the crowd scattered a bit, and people naturally formed into smaller groups and chatted, as tends to happens after any sort of gathering.