The Lights That Wouldn't Turn On

I had a dream the other night that I can't quite shake.

I was in a house in the suburbs. Chicago, I think, though the dream never said so directly. It just felt like it. I was visiting a couple I know, and another couple was there with us.

Something had happened. Someone had gotten in through the garage. There had been tampering, and now we were all standing around talking about it, the way people do after the fact, when the danger has passed, but the worry hasn't.

The conversation was about their security system, what it covered and what it didn't. They didn't have a Ring camera. No motion lights outside. The garage, we all agreed, wasn't really protected at all. I found myself explaining my own setup, walking them through what I had at home, as if that would help. As if describing safety somewhere else could make this house feel safer.

Then I noticed the lights.

Some were out. Others looked unscrewed, just slightly, the way a bulb sits when someone has loosened it but not removed it. I tried to turn one on and couldn't. I kept trying. Nothing.

The strange part is that the house felt familiar. I moved through it like I'd been there before. But when I reached for the memory, it wasn't there. I couldn't say when I'd visited, or if I had at all.

At one point I remembered a camera. I was sure a vendor had installed a Ring somewhere. I could almost see it. And then, even inside the dream, I knew that wasn't true. It was a memory of something that never happened.

We talked a lot about the past. The people there were older, and the conversation kept drifting backward, to the earlier incident, to how things used to be. Nobody talked about what came next. A room full of people looking over their shoulders at something that had already happened.

Then I woke up.

I've been thinking about it since, not trying to solve it exactly, just letting it stay.

What keeps returning to me is that everyone in the dream felt they understood the problem. We named the weak points, compared systems, and agreed the garage was exposed. And still, nothing got fixed. We stood in a house with lights that wouldn't turn on, talking about safety, without making anything safer.

I think a lot of us know that room.

I've seen it go like this at work. A group of employees needs an accommodation, and everyone agrees they do. Counsel reviews it and says you have to do this. Operations puts together a plan. Leaders pass it down to middle managers, who say they're working on it. Then nothing happens, except that the employees grow more frustrated and the rest of us start to wonder whether a solution will ever be found.

Then it starts again when there's a new wrinkle, or when someone decides to test the requirement one more time.

What strikes me is that every step in that sequence is real work. Counsel did review it. Operations did build a plan. The managers may well be working on it. Everyone can point to their part, the way I could point to my setup at home, and the employees are still waiting.

We describe a problem as if describing it counts as solving it. We point to the garage, the obvious gap, and feel a little better for having named it.

And when the problem comes around again, the conversation goes where the one in the dream went. We retell the history. We go back over who raised it first and what became of the last plan.

Going over the past can feel like diligence. It asks very little of us.

I keep coming back to the loosened bulbs. They weren't broken or missing. Each had been turned a quarter turn, enough to go dark and easy to miss unless you're the one reaching for the switch.

I think a lot of vulnerabilities look like that. Something slightly out of place that everyone assumes someone else has checked.

The part that unsettles me most is the memory that wasn't real, the camera I was so sure a vendor had installed. How often do we feel protected by something we only think we put in place? A policy we believe exists, a conversation we're sure we had, a plan someone told us they were working on.

Sometimes I'm not sure the safeguard exists anywhere except in our certainty that it's there.

In the dream I caught myself. Awake, I'm not sure I always do.

In the dream, I kept trying to turn on that light, and it never came on. I'm paying more attention now to the distance between the story we tell about safety and what happens when someone reaches for the switch.

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