I lived in the country in a dark, brown-stained home. It was Ohio but a rural Ohio unfamiliar, not with farms and fields but with deep green undergrowth and rolling hills that cast long shadows. I had been traveling to attend classes in some sort of certification program for some time. I drove on a twisting road through gloomy valleys and deep undergrowth to a small college campus where the program was held.

I would meet a woman for these classes, someone I knew as a colleague in the dream, and we would talk professionally. She was my age, well-dressed, and we would meet in an old lecture hall with high, heavy sash windows and tiered flooring for the classes. We would sit in old school desks where the desks are fixed to the chairs and watch powerpoint presentations and listen to the teacher on a speakerphone.

At our final class the woman and I learned that we had both done extremely well and that we had been selected for the same team for our first post-cert project in the "real world". The following week, we would meet our team members and get project details for the first time.

The following week, the woman was not there. She had a conflict and couldn't make it, the person in charge told me. But I met a few of my new team-mates -- the man in charge and two women, one of whom was Indian and spoke clipped BBC British.

We pulled our desk/chairs up to circle the speakerphone as we called in to join the other team members online. In addition to The Team, students from the class joined us to observe, sitting beyond our circle of desks.

"Before we get started, does anyone have questions?" said the man in charge.
"I do," said someone, a woman, on the speakerphone.
"Go ahead."
"What is the role of diversity in the criteria that is used to select the outcome of the project?"

Whatever the question actually was in my dream, it had the key terms of that sentence in it (role, diversity, criteria, select, outcome, project) and in my dream I knew the answer quite well. "Hugshyhermit would you like to take a crack at this question?" I tugged my desk closer to the speakerphone.

But as I began to respond, my team-mates began speaking at the same time, softly, but forming a meaningless babble of noise. My first reaction was to speak louder, but they also increased their voices.

"What? I didn't catch that," said the woman on the speakerphone and another voice said, "We're having trouble hearing you."

"What are you doing?" I asked my teammates and, speaking to the phone I said, "I'm sorry, we'll start again, I think my team may have something they want to say,"

"Sure," said the man in charge, but then they all leaned in and continued speaking all at once, so much that the sound I heard was the electronic babble you sometimes hear from crowd noise on the radio, sort of a digital running-water-brook noise.

The woman with the british clipped accent turned to me by way of explanation to say, "They're doing this on purpose. It's a form of sabotage to get us sidetracked from the real objective."

The voice on the phone sounded frustrated, "You aren't answering my question!

And suddenly the man in charge was ending the call, "...very excited to be working with all of you."

"What just happened here?" I wanted to know, "Her question may have missed the focus of the meeting, but I saw no problem in answering it so a stakeholder would understand where we were going. I didn't think it would take too long, and isn't that an objective of the project?" (Or something like that.)

"Yes, I agree." said the man in charge, "But we were on a limited timeframe."

One of the students, listening in, beamed at the man in charge, "I have heard great things about this team."

And he, standing and kicking one of his legs onto a desk seat, beamed back. "It's going to be crackerjack. When I heard who was going to be on it, I couldn't believe my luck."

That wasn't the entire dream. But it was enough for now, at 3a.m.