Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Dream 10. The Seventeenth Floor

I was with friends at a large fancy hotel. The only reason I could afford to stay was because it was work related. I had to work while I was there and then stay in whatever room they gave me. In exchange, my friends (I say friends, but these were two faceless girls in my dream, with no counterpart in my real life) could stay in any room they wanted.

I was done working for the night (bringing towels, blankets and such to guest rooms and carrying luggage) and was trudging off toward my room to sleep. It was well after midnight and the only people around were two elderly British women at the front desk and a smallish dirty maintenance man who reminded me of Gollum from Lord of the Rings (and since I never knew his name, that's what I will call him).

Gollum had been lurking around in the lobby. He stopped me and told me there was something on one of the floors he needed my help with. From the looks of the guy, I assumed he was pretty weak and felt sorry for him. He wasn't elderly, maybe fifty or sixty at most. Just short,  frail looking and quiet. He was a little hunched and walked with a limp. I had pity on the man. I trusted him.

I followed him up to the higher floors, avoiding the elevators. He told me he wasn't supposed to tie up the lifts. I was so tired and asked if he minded if I meet him up there, that I was going to go take the elevator up. He grabbed me then and said NO, keep moving! I began to get a little scared of him.

The stairs took us outside some of the time. Steep stairs along the side of the building, like in the movie Spirited Away. I was growing very uneasy and was so tired and sore from working all night. We finally arrived at the top floors, which were all storage space.

I knew then that something was seriously wrong. Gollum was walking normally now and didn't seem near as frail as he had been letting on. I turned to run and he grabbed my ankle. He dragged me up to the seventeenth floor and to a metal door. It was the entrance to the attic. It was dark and full of boxes. The place was huge, it looked like a warehouse, but completely full of stuff, right up to the ceiling. There was a mattress on the floor in a cleared out space, and he dragged me over to it an up onto it. The mattress was old and wet, completely filthy. Gollum was muttering to himself or to me the entire time, I couldn't understand what he was saying.

I realized I still had my phone with me. While he was busy trying to remove my shoes and pants, I discreetly turned on my phone and saw that it was open to Facebook.

I wrote a status update, "I am on the seventeenth floor of the Plaza Hotel and I am being rapt."

Autocorrect had ruined my call for help. I tried to fix it.

"*Farted"

DAMMIT AUTOCORRECT, now everyone will think this is a joke!

"*RAPED, HELP ME! " I waited. Nothing.

I looked down after a bit of waiting to see that Gollum had given up on my pants and was snuggling my side, asleep. Repulsed, I got up and ran, out the attic door and down to the sixteenth floor. My friends were lying on couches that were there on the landing, talking about my status update on Facebook. They didn't seem concerned.

I took the elevator down to the lobby, prepared to turn Gollum in to the hotel management and the police. On the way down, I checked Facebook again. A few people had liked my recent status updates. No one mentioned help. No one seemed concerned.

** I woke up at this point to get my kids ready for school. I wrote this down as soon as I got them on their buses, then fell back asleep... into the same dream. It took a twist for the Nightmare on Elm Street after that. Suddenly the hotel had all these boiler rooms and conveyor belts, and all these teenagers were looking for this guy, whom I called Gollum. They would get on a conveyor belt which would take them to some sort of inner workings of the building, it was the only way to get there. These kids were slowly disappearing. I'm not sure if I was even there anymore. It was as if I were a ghost, observing but not interacting.