I had a dream that, in East Quad (a dorm at UofM), the building was so old that they had one of those cisterns built into it. You know, those cisterns. It was a big brick above-ground well that was supposed to catch rainwater that they could then use for plumbing throughout the building. This was before the city had city water, and before cities in general had city water.

They had since built much building around this thing. For example, it was on the third floor, which used to be the roof.

The cistern was a historical landmark now, so they did some stuff to keep up with its maintenance. They had a lady live in there, for free. She wasn’t a student, she was just supposed to live in there, under the theory that she’d sort of be its caretaker.

And then there was me. I was the custodian. I wasn’t even the custodian for the rest of East Quad. I was just supposed to come in there once a week and clean up a bit.

I was supposed to do this around 3 o’clock in the afternoon. That lady tried to be out of the house at that time.

We sort of became friends, though. You have to be a kind of a quirky person to want to live in that cistern. And I, of course, am a kind of a quirky person. Also, some of my friends made friends with her, so people like Isaac and Adam would sometimes stop by to hang out or mess with her computer.

And of course, I would sometimes get lazy and not show up when I was supposed to.

On this day, I was at some sort of rally about the Michigan economy. They weren’t making any sense and didn’t have any solutions. Their basic thing was “We don’t like that the economy sucks”. They blamed people and things that didn’t have anything to do with it. They longed for bygone days which were also bad.

At one point, they were like “Who among us has a job?” as part of their rhetoric. At this point, I was like “Oh, crap. I do. I better go do it.”

So I rushed back to the cistern. It was 10pm, and the lady (Jennifer) was back. Well, that meant that we could hang out while I cleaned. Good times.