I don't know how I came to have the job, but I was baking bread for a small (somewhat backward, sort of a fusion of old school Eastern Bloc country with parts of North Dakota) village of people, and was the sole source for some specific kinds of rolls and things used by that group of people. There were some people I know (in waking life) in the village, but true to my level of media exposure, the place was also populated by movie extras that you would likely recognize, many of them from Hunt for Red October, because I just watched that again yesterday. Without an ex-Navy man in my house, I can enjoy submarine movies again. (Nothing personal, Brett.)
It was kind of a suck job, initially, but I came to enjoy it. The room with the ovens in it was basically this brick clay hovel, and a step-van was backed right up to that, filled with bread racks. For a couple of months (really, I have what seem to be very long dreams) I baked the bread and sold it, having difficulties with the electricity people, the water people, the landlords - and with getting my customers to pay up promptly and profitably. I slept and ate in the step-van and sometimes on the floor of the kitchen, because it was warmer. Eventually, I came to be accepted by the people of the town, and was doing pretty well at this baking job. (This is how you know it was a dream.) Even more eventually, there came a dawn when all my creditors came looking for their money all at once.
I went into the metal lockbox in the back, and I had the money. I had known that I would, and had made statements to that effect, thus drawing a crowd of people that wanted to see whether or not the bread man would fail. A couple of people from work, three or four friends, one or two people from my past, my wife, brother-in-law and most crucial to our story, my mother-in-law. (I'm sorry, but this is what I was actually dreaming about. You can stop reading now, if you'd like.) The rest were the aforementioned movie extras. I came out the the chits and the money, and had enough to be able to round way up for my creditors, giving them $100 instead of $85, and so on. I was pretty cocky about it, actually. The crowd was pleased, and some of them bought bread. My MIL asked, ruining the goodwill, "if there is any reason we should trust this money?" When I didn't respond to her at all, she went about telling people not to do business with me, since there was obviously no way I could have made all that money honestly, and if it were her, she wouldn't be affiliated with someone like that. "It just wasn't Christian."
From the back of the van, underneath the display board, I shouted, "Carolyn, if you keep doing what you're doing, I will hate you for the rest of your life." She walked back across the street, and an argument ensued involving her, some of my customers, Brian, my brother-in-law, and C, my wife. It was basically cobbled together from real arguments we've all had with her, and there have been plenty. At some point, my wife said something like, "Jesus Christ, Carolyn," and the MIL winced at this blasphemy. My response to that was predictable, 100% me. "Fuck your imaginary blasphemy, bitch. Jesus H. one-legged hopping Christ on a trampoline, you're so small and petty, it makes me sick to look at you." And I then savaged her with a breadknife and chucked her into the roaring flames of one of the ovens. That part actually wasn't very clear - it just became obvious that I had done it. Then, my wife woke me up, because I was apparently making a fair bit of noise from the edge of consciousness.
They say ("they") that when you kill someone in a dream, especially a person you know, it means that you want to "kill" the traits in yourself represented by that person. That is, I suppose, plausible. It's plausible to think that I would like to erase the narrow, petty, dogmatic and untrusting segments of my personality. I think it's equally plausible though, that I would like to grind her bones to make my bread. There's more to this, I'm sure. Not so much that I'm going to start making geographic maps using mashed tubers, but more, nonetheless.
I wanna know what you think: 737-ROCK, 737-ROLL, first ten callers get tickets to Saturday night's show featuring Soul Commitment, a band I just made up.