Dream: New maddening thing
I just woke up from a dream in which I was in an old, run-down building around 18 stories tall the units in which included both offices and apartments. Made of concrete, steel, and brick, it was dirty and badly maintained; there was trash everywhere, in every corner and nook. I needed to get out of it as quickly as possible, but it turned out that both the one elevator in the building and the stairways would only let you descend one or a few floors at a time; you had to wait a day to descend more floors using any of them. I had gone up the elevator from the ground floor all the way to the top floor with other people who knew where that elevator was; but the descent was only possible one or a few floors per day.
I had a good reason to want to get down to the ground floor and get out: I had given or sold some of my most valuable books and other possessions to someone who apparently gave them to "the queens," two gay men who had a used-book store across the street somewhere, and I needed to get outside and head for their store as quickly as possible if I wanted them back. I don't clearly remember why I had given away/sold them in the first place, just that I had and desperately wanted them back. But I had to leave the building to get to that bookstore, and suddenly the building wasn't letting me. It was either somehow alive or it had been built strangely, and everyone but me thought my desperation to leave the building at once was hilarious. At one point, a woman went with me down one flight of stairs and opened a door to the outside, saying, "You can get out here." But when I went outside, I was still many stories up, and what she meant was that I could leap a gap of maybe 25-30 feet to a tar-covered rooftop and from there down to the ground -- or, more likely, to another level one or two stories down, probably killing myself in the process.
I hate this sort of dream. Dreams like this come in numerous forms: endless walking along the verge of one freeway after another, trying to find a way to get to an off-ramp that could take me into the suburbs served by those freeways; flight on foot through a big city, losing one possession after another, even my clothes, until I have nothing; a frantic search in an enormous mansion with a maze-like interior, looking for a way out, but only finding evermore corridors; a search on foot through the campus of a large university for a classroom where I'm supposed to be taking a class. Now this. Why?
-- And, of course, I woke up with the beginnings of a migraine headache, par for the course for my lucid dreams.
Added @ 11:23 a.m., 3/31/11:
It just occurred to me: I should have gone looking for ropes or cables to use to manually lower myself down from the building to the ground. Why didn't I? Maybe I was so frantic to get out of the building that I couldn't think. There may have been other possibilities, too, but I didn't think of them, just ran around and around one floor of the building trying to find an exit that wasn't there.
I had a good reason to want to get down to the ground floor and get out: I had given or sold some of my most valuable books and other possessions to someone who apparently gave them to "the queens," two gay men who had a used-book store across the street somewhere, and I needed to get outside and head for their store as quickly as possible if I wanted them back. I don't clearly remember why I had given away/sold them in the first place, just that I had and desperately wanted them back. But I had to leave the building to get to that bookstore, and suddenly the building wasn't letting me. It was either somehow alive or it had been built strangely, and everyone but me thought my desperation to leave the building at once was hilarious. At one point, a woman went with me down one flight of stairs and opened a door to the outside, saying, "You can get out here." But when I went outside, I was still many stories up, and what she meant was that I could leap a gap of maybe 25-30 feet to a tar-covered rooftop and from there down to the ground -- or, more likely, to another level one or two stories down, probably killing myself in the process.
I hate this sort of dream. Dreams like this come in numerous forms: endless walking along the verge of one freeway after another, trying to find a way to get to an off-ramp that could take me into the suburbs served by those freeways; flight on foot through a big city, losing one possession after another, even my clothes, until I have nothing; a frantic search in an enormous mansion with a maze-like interior, looking for a way out, but only finding evermore corridors; a search on foot through the campus of a large university for a classroom where I'm supposed to be taking a class. Now this. Why?
-- And, of course, I woke up with the beginnings of a migraine headache, par for the course for my lucid dreams.
Added @ 11:23 a.m., 3/31/11:
It just occurred to me: I should have gone looking for ropes or cables to use to manually lower myself down from the building to the ground. Why didn't I? Maybe I was so frantic to get out of the building that I couldn't think. There may have been other possibilities, too, but I didn't think of them, just ran around and around one floor of the building trying to find an exit that wasn't there.