I had a dream about a particular brand of coffee gaining in popularity across the nation. “Best coffee, ever!” people were saying, and I had been sent to the manufacturing plant to check it out. As I entered the front door to an empty hallway on the left side of an old, unpainted wooden building on the edge of town, I noticed a crowd of agents busily picking up and hauling off new batches of freshly roasted coffee from a drive-in window on the other side of the building.
My guide excitedly told me how the owner had learned the secret blend in prison, and offered to give me an exclusive scoop on how the coffee was made. I was not going to learn the ingredients of the secret blend, I was informed, but I would get an inside look at the production facility.
As we walked down the back hall toward the kitchen, I first noticed a mostly empty room with a few old, large bags of rice stacked up on one side. The dusty storage room was locked, but I could see through the metal screen that the label included a man’s face on the lower front corner. I was informed not to pay attention to that since he was supposedly irrelevant anyway.
Toward the end of the back hallway, I saw a person enter a closet, come back out with a shovel full of dark material, and then take it to the kitchen. I also saw a line of people outside a window at the end excitedly picking up newly prepared bags of coffee grounds as fast they could bring them from the kitchen. I also noticed someone exiting a bathroom located between the first storage room and the closet.
Standing in the middle of the kitchen, my guide pointed out another closet in the corner where the workers with shovels would enter to retrieve the secret blend and then bring it to the kitchen to be dried, pressed, and packed for shipment.
Although they dismissed any danger, I noticed that the workers entering the closet wore a thick, waterproof protective apron, boots, and gloves. My impression was that behind the closet door, the raw material being brought up from below was stinky, and maybe poisonous and even radioactive in some way.
I also noticed that whenever workers would go in the closet to get the secret blend, someone else was always in the bathroom next door, just like I had noticed while entering the back hallway earlier.
At that point, I began to suspect that the secret blend was human waste, and that the dried, pressed coffee making news all across the country was actually made out of excrement.
My guide also bragged about the company’s excellent media team and promotional strategy, including their coordinated method of airing promotions approximately 29 hours after production. I didn’t quite understand, but it seemed related to allowing time for the information to “air out” before hitting the front pages.
In my dream, the name of the coffee was “Janga, Janga.”
When I woke up the next morning and shared the dream with my wife, she asked, “What does ‘janga’ mean?” I had no idea, so I looked it up.
Turns out, “janga” is a Swahili word for “disaster,” as well as a slang word for “whore” (as in a girl who sleeps around with lots of men is called a “janga”).
Whatever the dream means, I suspect that “Janga, Janga” is not a good thing, and that some people will be in for quite a surprise when they find out what they have actually been “drinking.”
