the piece works within a recurring framework of luke’s; the human as machine (a very dmt notion as it happens).
I once caught a flu which put me in a high fever, and when I was brought some soup and bread to eat became convinced that my task was to separate the food out into its constituent molecules and place them in heaps, sorted by type, at the foot of the bed.
In a half-awake state another time, when someone else entered the room and tried to wake me up properly I felt that I was a telephone network and that they were trying to route a call through me to some receiver, but the call could not be connected.
I had a dream on another occasion that I was trying to debug a computer program, and the problem was that a buffer in memory kept filling up and needed to be cleared. Nothing I did seemed to fix the issue. Then I woke up and realised I needed to empty my bladder. Nothing I could have done in the dream would have resolved this problem (at least, not satisfactorily). I often think about this when I see someone desperately trying to solve a problem (usually something physical, like being overtired and stressed) by fretting, anxiously and circularly, about a symbolically displaced analogue of that problem, convinced that if they can only get
that right, everything will be sorted.