I had the most amazing dream last night. I was in some big corporate space, almost a conference hall, big high ceilings, marble floors, some of those drop-down metal link doors that get rolled down over the windows at malls sometimes.

I had this box they’d given me, maybe six inches wide by ten long, inch, inch-and-a-half deep. Very colorful, blues, yellows, reds, like icons on the top and sides. The top of the box was mostly open, a rounded-corner rectangle, maybe an inch or less inside the outer edge. (These proportions are going to turn out to be impossible but that’s dreams for you.)

The box was a car configuration tool for whoever owned this building. I think it was General Motors. Anyway you’d make a selection somehow, and a car shape would pop up through the top opening, a three-dimensional plastic shape of whatever car you chose to configure. Over the course of the dream, I did a coupe or sedan and a sort of fast-backed shape like an old Barracuda or something. As the shape popped up it made sort of pop-crinkle-snap sounds as the various creases formed that shaped the car.

The colored icons on the box somehow controlled the car selection, the color of the car it was configuring, the trim, the interior, and so on. The thin surface plastic started out a sort of pink color but as you clicked the icons, it would turn whatever color you had selected. Though it started out just like a solid pink vacu-form shape, the plastic could turn any color, or even transparent, so you could see the inside of the vehicle. Since this was a dream, you could look inside and see great detail, the seats and wheel, the chrome trim, little instruments.

Manipulate the icons (sorry, no details here, the thing was so incredibly easy to use that I can’t even remember how it worked), and pop-crinkle-snap you had another model of car to work on. At one point, I somehow got a look inside the box, and over under the edges, there were stacked shape parts, sections of hoods or fenders, it looked like. These were yellow and seemed to have little posts out the bottom, so that each shape was like a yellow, curved table-top with the little feet. I suppose the internal mechanism used those feet to position the pieces and they somehow controlled the form of the thin pink plastic that made the car shape.

I played with it a while, and then I noticed a fellow watching with interest from across the hallway. I believe he was Iranian. He definitely had a Persian kind of look to him. Anyway, I took the box over to him, showed it to him, popped up a new vehicle that I thought would be interesting to him, pop-crinkle-snap. He said “wow”, and I gave him the box to play with.