I was young, middle-aged, in my thirties, happy, confident, relaxed. I encountered a diverse dreamscape of buildings, floods, people, and events.

A young boy saving kittens was met several times. He never spoke. Seemed perhaps four. His features and complexion changed. He was never of one color, one ethnicity, but different each time that we met. I worried about him so I would seek him out.

Because a deluge was underway. A swollen black and gray sky loomed above. Flood waters were rising through valleys and ravines. I worried about the kittens and the boy. Gray, black, white kittens. They were newborns, fitting into the child’s hand. At first he had four gray kittens. Then he had four gray and four black. The third time he and I met, he had three each, gray, white, and black.

I’d go find him and learned that he liked to hang out in shallow gullies. I talked to him, questioning what he was going to do, and told him my worries about protecting the kittens. He listened and didn’t speak but pointed. I realized with relief that others were caring for the boy. He wasn’t alone, and the kittens were burrowing into tunnels. I never seen anything like it, but I immediately understood that they would be safe.

Through it all, despite worries, I was relaxed, confident, happy.

Interspersed with checking on the boy and his kittens, I was embedded in a ramshackle, old, cluttered office building, a red-brick form follows function design three stories tall, with lots of windows. Situated on the third floor, I looked over a long, grassy lawn. A young woman out there took directions from people in the building. Waking has robbed me of understanding of her role, but at one point in the dream, I wrote lengthy instructions for her, using a large sheet of cardboard and a black magic marker. My plan was to go out there and post it by her, sticking in the ground so that it was vertical. These were supposedly providing her course corrections based on my observations of all transpiring.

After writing the instructions, I decided not to post them and set them aside. But, surprise, the young woman — white as Caspar, short, with curley dark hair and a warm smile — came up, talking to me, and then said, “Oh, you’re the man who wrote the instructions.” I asked, “How’d you know that? I never posted them?” Looking at them beside me, she said, “I saw them from where I was. They made sense. Thanks for writing them.” I was surprised and delighted that she knew of them and pleased by her comments.

I’d been doing other things, drafting missives and instructions, making phone calls throughout all of this, preparing, because we were going through the evacuation stages. One aspect was I was dealing with multiple issues and was achieving impressive results. By finding and contacting quality assurance in various departments, providing them feedback and suggestions, and sometimes making a complaint, things were being fixed for me.

Others had noticed and finally, a swarthy, slender man approached me. Much younger than me, in his early twenties, he inquired about how I’d fixed something. I told him that I’d lobbied the QA function in that department, and they’d worked with their people to improve things.

Other things went on — like the young woman approaching me and checking on the boy and his kittens — and then it was time for me to leave. As I prepared, the young man returned, pleased and proud, telling me about how he’d used my guidance to fix something, and how, now that he knew to do this, he was going to fix everything.

I educated him that you can’t go to that same QA for other things, explaining, “Every department has a QA. Each must be individually contacted and the problems for that department brought to their attention. They will fix them.”

He thought about this and then nodded understanding, a little down that he had much more to do than he realized. I told him that I had confidence in him that he would do it. He brightened at that, and then I picked up my black bag and set off.

Dream end.