I had this dream the other night. Really. It took the form of an educational film, of the sort the Encyclopedia Britannica produced in the 1960s. I don't know what the dream means, but it was too interesting not to write it down. I submit it for your edification and amusement.

The rugged hills of central Pennsylvania around Titanville have always been home to the smashmouth football favored by these hometown heroes.

Until recently, these hills were mined for anthracite coal, to charge our nation's power plants. But thanks to computer scientists, the sound of blasting and bulldozers echoes again, producing high-grade toner for the world's laser printers and photocopying machines.

Toner. It seems so simple on the consumer end. You buy it by the bottle, or it comes preloaded into your disposable cartridge. It's the magical black dust that forms on the page to print whatever you want it to -- letters, numbers, even photo-quality pictures.

Here we see a Hewlett-Packard Laserjet printing out a letter for an important executive's signature. Note the precise, unwavering line, and the smudgefree surface -- telltale signs of Pennsylvania toner quality.

But there's a story to tell here. It begins with the discovery by the Xerox Corporation's Irwin Fouts in 1967 that high-grade photocopy toner can be made from a low-grade anthracite emulsion suspension in an electrostatic coal slurry, dehydrated, and then ground to a microfine powder. Serendipity played a role in the discovery: Fouts was trying to make synthetic coffee.

Suddenly the area's surface mines reopened and draglines were laid down across much of the Susquehanna Ridge. It was a new kind of mining. Big Bill here, the world's largest shovel, made by the Bucyrus-Erie Co. in 1962, could move 150 tons of coal -- three railcars worth -- in one bucketload.

Today's toner mines, however, stress small-scale production. A one-man bobtail bulldozer can easily push enough ore around to print the daily documents for a Fortune 500 corporation.

Where 12-ton Big Bill could only move thirty feet an hour, Little Bill here scoots from platform to platform without breaking a sweat.

But the key to today's booming toner mines lies deep in the past. A billion years ago, massive volcanic activity on what is now North America leveled giant bioforms -- a continent's worth of forests, grasslands, whole lakes, and all the living things inhabiting each. The immense geological pressure on this biological matter created rich veins of toner streaking through these hills -- there, in the words of Irwin Fouts, for the taking.

Toner technology was no stranger to the area's original inhabitants. Several tribes in the Iriquois Alliance used a form of printer toner, applied with wild turkey quills, in artifacts displayed here in the gleaming showcases of the Mellon County Historical Society.

The tradition continues today, as these fresh-faced graduates of Xerox Technical College in Titanville know full well. Successful careers in the booming toner industry await every graduate, and everyone else as well. Once the toner gets in your blood, they will tell you, it is hard to get it out.

But it would be untrue to suggest that today's inexpensive printing comes without human cost. Ask the men in the toner fields today, whose fathers also worked them. They will tell you about the toner mine collapse of 1977, when a slurry wall buckled and eleven men were swept away to an inky fate.

Their heroism is commemorated by this sculpture by Iola Papillae, commissioned by Xerox, that stands today before the county government building in Titanville, showing eleven darkened figures gazing intently toward the very hills that claimed them.

What they see on the horizon is anyone's guess. Foreign competition, like the bubblejet wells of the High Kalahari, is applying pressure to a market already squeezed on price and capacity.

And there is always the possibility that one day, we will all look up from our computers and realize that the toner is gone, that we took a treasure deposited in the earth for us by Providence, and we squandered it.

But hey, say these tough sons of linebackers and tackles -- life's that way.

So press your Enter keys, and keep those printers running warm. Because the hard working people here in Toner Country promise to give you everything they've got. And only when the last T is crossed, and the last I is dotted, will it be quitting time.