I'm in an open field during the fall, next to a grove of birch trees. A man holds me at gunpoint, and a police officer escalates the confrontation  The hostage man struggles physically with the cop, and his gun goes off, directly into my head. For the first time in a dream, I die.

I'm in an office building without windows. Beige walls, yellow counter tops, with 1990's era computers and CRT-monitors arranged on desks. I believe I'm at work, and sit down to operate one of the humming machines. I'm confused, as weeks seem to have passed, and all my files are gone. Nothing seems right.

I go into a break room, lit by harsh florescent lighting. The room is eerily silent. A girl is sitting down to eat lunch, and I move to join her. I can't hold a fork, or chopsticks to grasp the noodles. My ears buzz, and vision blurs whenever I try and interact with anything. I focus, and the vertigo goes away, allowing me to eat lunch with my chopsticks. The girl silently ignores me. I look away, and back - she's gone. Hours have passed on the wall clock. The food I was eating seemingly never existed.

I return to the computer, and attempt to move files around. An Asian man, wearing a white short sleeved dress shirt and tie approaches me. He looks remarkably like 'Harold' from the film 'Harold & Kumar'. He explains that I'm dead. 

Disbelieving, he shows me a series of work orders, each with elements missing from them.
"Were do you think this stuff goes?" he remarks. "We quietly manipulate the manifests, shaping the company - controlling the world."

"Ghosts?" I ask. He opens a concealed wall panel, removing a box, and showing me pieces that were repurposed or hidden away for future use. He holds up a set of brightly colored splice-cables. "Dye-set fiber optics. It slows down data transmission, lets us monitor things, and change what we need. I'm just low level. The old ones are pulling all the strings."

I look closely at the monitor screen, seeing two drives that didn't exist before. One labeled "Data", and the other "Dump". "We need to purge those drives. She's starting to see things." He pauses. "Your stunt at lunch didn't help."

The clock jumps again, yet the man and I are still in the same positions we were before. 
"Wh-what... why am I here? Didn't -" I stammer. 

"Die? Yeah. That sucks." He says. "The Older Ones put you here, to keep things running smoothly. Keep feeding them information, deleting other information. You and I help them manage the low-level business stuff." 

"What about lunch?" I ask. "I ate food. I... moved things around."  

The man walks over to a bank of server machines, and looks at the blinking lights. They seem to slow as he observes them. "You wanted to eat food, so your mind filled in the blanks. None of that happened. Nothing does, not for us. Not anymore."

A harsh, gray light began to filter in under the door. The man begins to panic. "Quickly! Dump those data drives. We can't let anyone find those. They'll know about us, about what happens after!" I try to move the mouse on the computer, but everything moves backwards, in reverse. My ears are buzzing, and the world becomes a blur.

_____

I awoke in the middle of the night, thinking about what happened in my dream. There was another aspect to the dream, but after the blur and buzzing in my ears, I have no memories.

In retrospect, I realized what my mind constructed was the idea of soul enslavement: using ghosts to power and shape not only one business, but global finance, politics, war, and the world. The Older Ones, perhaps were ancient ghosts. Of who, or what I don't know. The only knowledge I gleaned between the panic, and the blur was this: they silently shaped our world, but to unknown ends.