It’s not up to you. At the proper moment, they’ll trigger you.

I entered the small adjacent building wearing a dark navy blue suit and white button-down shirt. The building seemed to be nothing more than a medium sized room with rows of chairs set up to accommodate maybe fifty to a hundred people. The larger, taller building next door was some sort of hall or auditorium.

I sat down near a section filled with women younger than I— early to mid twenties, perhaps. They were all dressed alike in dark red dresses. I looked around more and noticed that all women present were dressed this way, and the men dressed like I.

We began to wonder aloud why we were there, how we got there and how we knew what time to assemble– it was a strange mystery. As we discussed these questions, a short, slender middle aged man, slightly balding and wearing spectacles and a black tuxedo with long coat tails, entered the room and said “Time?…” as if to address the question at hand.

He then pronounced some sort of short, melodic phrase about “the time” (I wish I could recall the exact words of his rhyme), at which the gathered, seated crowd spontaneously leapt to their feet and in single file began a jaunty march out the door behind this strange man, towards the larger building, where we were told we would be given seating instructions.

I’ve had some strange dreams in recent months. Some are nightmares that I’d slip back into each time I went back to sleep, and others just creepy and unsettling like this one. Arriving for unknown reasons at the correct time for some unknown event, and then involuntarily leaping to my feet and marching forward at the pronouncement of some key phrase, which phrase had no words relating to jumping, standing, or marching… it was like being a puppet, I’d been programmed with an auditory Pavlovian response mechanism, along with dozens of other people. I was aware, but not in control, of what was happening in those moments. Bizarre.