I Dream of a Technicolor Screwdriver

People often dream about their childhood home. For many, that home represents a simpler and more enjoyable time. For others it's a mixed set of emotions. Dreaming of your home is a very basic part of your subconscious mind. I don't dream about my childhood or teenage homes very often. I usually dream about an old job.

I've blogged about this topic enough to make it a regular category.

For whatever reason, I'm more likely to dream about my first job, which was a family owned and operated Ace Hardware store in the Raleigh, NC area.  The business doesn't exist any more, at least, not in the real world.  The building was torn down years ago to put up a gas station.

The store still exists within my mind.  Over the years, the store has been remodeled, altered, messed up, or left alone.  I can still find specific items within its aisles (something I could do back 17 years ago).  I've always known the store like the back of my hand.  I can still envision the people I've worked with, some of whom have surely passed away by now.

Often, when I visit, I'm returning to it after all these years.  The owners have been waiting for my return.  My coworkers were elated to have me back.  The store's struggled over the years since I left.

One time, in a dream, the hardware was replaced by home goods such as comforters and bed sheets.  Other times, the store is nearly empty of product.  On occasion, it looks like some sort of nouveau, semi-artistic hardware store.  Usually, though, it's the same store it was for all the years I worked there.

Last week, I had another hardware store dream.  This one was a bit different than any of the others.

Back in the real world, the store's back room contained a couple sets of older industrial shelving - the kind of shelving you'd see in a warehouse store.  When I worked at the store, the front had wooden bins where we could drop off locks to be rekeyed, blades to be resharpened, lamps to be wired, and small power equipment to be fixed.  We stocked extra bags and supplies there.  We also had all the parts and pieces needed to fix screens and windows, some of which were in eight-foot tubes laid on the shelving.  We even had a 4'x8' work table that could be pulled up to give us space in the back room.  This was part of my every day workspace after a while.

The two sets of racks were set to give us space between them to access the back side of each rack.  We'd stored carts there, from time to time, or larger product.  We even hung our Ace Hardware vests on a closet rod between the racks.  On top of the entire setup were a few pieces of thick plywood, which kept the racks stable at the top and gave us a lot of room to store long-term products (thing we didn't sell too often), but was often bare because a ladder was needed to get to the area.

In last week's dream, I went through a lot of the usual "returning to the store" aspects of these dreams.  After that, I decided to clean out the racks - something I had to do from time to time back in the old days.  I climbed up to the rack that sat about seven feet off the ground.  In there, I found something I wasn't expecting: personal effects.

When I left that store (I had decided to move on to another opportunity, certain the store was going to fall into the toilet once a Home Depot opened up a mile away), I had already removed most of my personal effects.  I knew I was looking to leave, and when I'd found another job, I gave two and a half week's notice.  I left a lot of things that I could have claimed as my own, but the majority of my own stuff (tools and such) had been removed long before I left.

While on the shelf in my dream, I found a bag full of my own stuff - but not work-related items - personal things from around the time I worked there (high school and college).  I found comic books I'd drawn.  I found dot-matrix printouts of stories I'd written.  Everything seemed to be something related to my more creative skills.  A few things were stories and art I'd never finished, but most of what I found were things that I'd made in real life and lost long ago.  For whatever reason, all of my creativity was left behind in the hardware store.  And I'd discovered it again.

If I were to analyze the dream, I'd probably decide that the dream represents my ever-present sense of losing my creativity over the years.  The part of my life which contained the peak of my creativity would have been about the same time I worked at the hardware store.  But I've never had this theme pop in this this type of dream.  This is new.

So I'm not exactly sure of what to make of it.  I can tell you this, though, that the following night, as I laid in bed waiting for sleep to cradle and carry me away, I wondered if I was going to have another hardware store dream.  Instead, I pieced together a potential story idea related to that theme, which I'm going to pursue.

In the meantime, I'll continue to dream about locks, hinges, fasteners and screwdrivers.  In vivid clarity.

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