Far East Center / 375 S Federal

Click for map: Far East Center / 375 S Federal / lat 39.71009910110357 lon -105.02560087489432

Call 720-845-5413 extension 28 to hear this dream.

You are visiting every single business in this shopping center, going from one to the next, starting downstairs & moving upstairs, & you’re having a lovely time. Many of the businesses are exactly what you expect: you get a delicious bun & moonpie from the bakery, you book an exciting trip at the travel agency, you pick up some groceries at the market, etc. Other businesses are more surprising: one business is a rehabilitation center for injured pigeons, & all the pigeons are glowing neon colors; in one business you can get your taxes done while you lift heavy rocks; one business consists of nothing but a person sitting on a wooden stool who sharpens pencils perfectly. You walk into one business & see a vast storage space behind the counter. Metal file cabinets many stories tall fill the storage space in orderly rows. The space is far larger than the building could possibly hold. Hello! a chipper person at the counter says. Hello! you say. What have you got stored in all these cabinets? The person chuckles. Dreams, they say. Whose dreams? you say. Everyone’s, they say. You really look now into the storage space & see how the cabinets retreat back until perspective tucks them together. The cabinets, you realize, go on forever. Do you, you say, have my dreams? The counter person pulls out a rolodex. What’s your name? they say. You tell them your name. They flip through the rolodex then stop. Yep, they say. Here you are. They write something on the back of their hand with a  blue pen, then jump from their set & run down an aisle of cabinets, running & running until they are only a tiny speck in the distance. Then you hear a squeak of a metal drawer opening. Then a squeak of it closing. Then they are running back, carrying a tall stack of folders. The get to the counter & plop the tall stack of folders there. There must be thousands, millions of your dreams in those folders. What does it cost, you say, for me to see all those dreams? The person assesses the folders. They get out a calculator & poke at it a bit. It’ll be, they say, all the numbers. You look out the front windows, back out to the parking lot & suddenly you realize how many numbers are out there, everywhere, numbers on signs, phone numbers & prices & addresses, numbers on the sides of delivery trucks, numbers on license plates, in the small print on buckets that you’d never normally have noticed. You rush outside & gather up all the numbers in your arms, plucking them from the signs & parked cars & from passing trucks & buses & you open up your wallet & pluck the numbers from your drivers license & cards & off the faces of all the cash you have, until your arms are so full of numbers that you can barely see over the pile you hold & then you reenter the business & drop the huge pile of numbers onto the counter. The person looks over the pile. What about, they say, the number 19? You get out a pencil & paper & write down 19, then pluck that number off & toss it into the pile. What about, they say, 463,206? You write down that number & pluck it off & toss it into the pile too. The person cites a few more numbers & you write them out & add them to the pile, until they are satisfied that you have collected all the numbers. They hand you the pile of folders of dreams. You open the top folder & skim through the dreams. These are recent ones. You remember many of them. You pull a folder from the bottom of the stack & open it. These are the dreams you dreamed as a very small child, from a time in your life from which you have very few memories. And though you do not recall any of these dreams, as you look through them, they all feel so very familiar.