He sits in his office made of walls, at his desk made of desk, on his chair made of itself. Everything where he is is real, and he is going through his files. He is organizing what he has to work with. He keeps dream ideas on a rolodex. His rolodex is infinite. He converted to a rolodex some time back, and he will be damned if he now upgrades to a spreadsheet or a database. His rolodex is fine. It's infinite.
He's pulling out dream cards from his rolodex, and putting them in slots. There are slots slotted all through his desktop's dark surface, slots punched all down the fronts and sides of several large dark cabinets. Every slot is a sleeping brain. The dream idea goes in, and the brain takes it and works through it and turns it into a dream. Once it's pulled back out again (or it pops out, somnius interruptus! the alarm clock again? a loud noise? or occasionally, death) the dream is forever changed. Back it goes, into the rolodex and always right in its proper place. The Organizer could justly be proud of his skills. This has never occurred to him.
He's been assigned several tens of thousands of minds in a section of a densely-populated metropolitan area. It's considered a prestigious assignment - posh neighborhoods, a prominent city. But he wishes he were back in charge of little Killawee, Michigan; or that one prosperous village on the Danube, all those long centuries back. Having in your hands the dreams of a whole community, discrete and entire, was satisfying. Still: a job to do. No time for reminiscence.
No one dreams every night, of course. People think it's just that they don't remember their dreams every night. Really it's just that some nights, the Organizer doesn't slot one in. On those nights, you sleep through no dream at all, your mind sliding through the vague impressions left from before, some of the dream ink seeping onto your mind from the overlapping palimpsest of old dreams left behind. You wake up uneasy, thinking "what was that? What just slipped from me?" Nothing, in fact.
The Organizer is bored in the daytime, with only a fraction of his full slate of minds to see to. He's long felt he could easily handle a sizable village on the other side of the world, in addition to his main duties. He's suggested this as an obvious improvement, at the biannual efficiency meetings. Oh, the looks from the others.
He used to shuffle decks of index cards, with terrific facility and never dropping one. Sorting and sliding one up, looking at it, shaking his head (there would be no one to see or interpret this nonverbal signal), tapping it back down into the pack and pulling up another. Sometimes he feels he used to take more care in those days, choosing the dream to the dreamer, trying harder to make the recurring and the random seem equally significant. He misses the feel of the index cards, shuffling in his hands. But the rolodex is better, and he won't go back. It's an improvement.
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