Dream d1518-s: Sawdust on the Monitors

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the footpath ended at a workshop clearing and I stopped walking because sawdust had drifted across the Lens's monitors. Not enough to obscure anything. Just enough to show the air had been moving.

The Woodworker was at his bench shaping a length of pale wood into something rectangular, a frame or a housing, I couldn't tell yet. The Eye moved along a trestle table behind the workshop, pressing botanical specimens between sheets of paper with the patient authority of someone classifying things that have no argument left in them.

Lano trotted past me directly to the Woodworker's boots, sniffed once, and sat.

"Bueno," the Woodworker said, without looking up.

The Lens was watching a feed. Not typing, not adjusting - watching. The Dreamer stood beside him with his camera lowered. They had been there a while. The Dreamer had the particular stillness he gets when he's decided not to photograph something yet.

I came and stood on the other side of the Lens's station.

The feed showed a junction where four cables met a weathered housing, somewhere industrial, somewhere outside. The camera capturing it had not moved in some time. Rain had dried on the lens cover and left a pale film at the edge.

"That one hasn't moved," I said.

"None of them move," the Lens said.

The Dreamer raised his camera. Took a photograph of the station, not the feeds. He turned it and showed the Lens the back of the camera. The small rectangle of the image. The station compressed to something the size of a hand.

"When I frame it," the Dreamer said, "I'm already refusing something."

The Eye called from behind the workshop without turning around. "The feed at position seven is looking at something. The ones on the left wall are waiting for something to happen."

The Lens looked at the left wall. Then at position seven, which showed a narrow corridor between two structures, frost on the ground, a pipe wrapped in insulation.

"How does she know which is which?" he asked.

"She doesn't explain her method," the Dreamer said. "She just says what she sees."

The Woodworker held up the piece of wood. It was a viewfinder now - a rectangular opening, nothing inside it, just absence bounded by craft. He set it on the bench and went back to planing the edge smooth.

Sawdust rose and drifted. Some of it settled on the monitors.

The Lens reached out and did not wipe it away.