I dreamed I lived in a multi-use high rise on St. Charles Ave. It was a nice, snug apartment, and it was reasonably quiet, even with Mardi Gras weekend going on down below. Just before bed, I decided I needed something at the convenience store in the lobby, so I put on my robe and headed down.
I went down the flight of steps from my door to a landing in the drab stairwell of white walls and metal steps and rails painted gray, leading up and down in all directions to other gray metal doors like mine. I went through one of the doors lower down to get to the wood paneled hall to the elevator.
The elevator started down at a normal speed, but fell faster and faster until I was in free fall, hovering above the floor, terrified that it had broken and I was about to die. But gradually it slowed and my feet met the floor, and the elevator stopped at a parking garage level. I hurried out, even though it wasn’t the lobby. I decided I’d find another way.
I went through some glass doors into a marble-floored department store with potted plants and racks of expensive clothing tastefully arranged. The walls had mosaic patterns, and a brilliantly polished wooden grand staircase led up to a second level.
Off to the right was a sleek, ultramodern coffee shop, and amid its trendy tables another elevator was tucked against a wall. It was a wide, deep, hexagonal space behind floor to ceiling windows. On the floor, in front of its sliding doors, were round metal disks, ridged all around in a radial pattern. To summon the elevator you stood on a disk and the doors would open. But you had to wait there for a certain number of people to enter.
I stood on a plate, then hurried through the quickly closing doors. I looked around for the number panel to select the 40th floor, but I couldn’t find it and had to step back as more people entered.
Suddenly the elevator had launched itself upward so fast that somehow again we were all flying through the air, feet from the floor, bouncing off of each other. I grabbed onto the arm of someone next to me and squeezed my eyes shut in terror until it slowed down, my feet met the floor, and the doors opened at floor S50, according to a tiny display beside the doors.
That wasn’t my floor, so I looked again for the controls. I realized then that there was some sort of laser scan in use, and it was identifying the elevator occupants and determining from that where people were going. It was dropping people off at their floors in the order they’d entered.
I got hustled off too early, though, after flying around miserably a few more times. I was walking through a rooftop mini golf course when I realized the sky was lightening, and morning was coming. I’d been wandering for hours and was suddenly struck by the worry that maybe I hadn’t locked my door and it had been unsecured for all that time. But I felt my keys in the left pocket of my robe, so I decided I had locked up okay.
I made my way back inside the building and found myself in a really warm, richly furnished lobby outside a trans-friendly day spa. I went up to the receptionist and asked if there was an elevator or stairwell I could use. She pointed me to four sets of brown wooden doors, centered on the four walls of the large lobby. I estimated which one was on the wall closest to my apartment, and got in.
The elevator went up at a normal pace, thank goodness, and stopped a couple floors up to let in a man in a black pinstripe suit, a matching black pinstripe cloth fedora, and gleaming black and white saddle shoes. Once I got past the drama of his ensemble I realized I recognized his face. My jaw dropped open just as the elevator stopped to let him out into a burgundy and gold steampunk themed casino.
The dinging slots and flashing lights made it seem completely unreal, and as the elevator stayed in place, I asked the hostess nearby, “WAS THAT DANNY TREJO???” She laughed and said it sure was. She asked me what floor I was headed to. I told her floor 40, and she reached into the elevator and fiddled with a tiny slot machine contraption I hadn’t seen before on a small wooden table to the left of the doors. Its readout flashed “40” as the doors closed and I was on my way.
When the elevator stopped and the doors opened, I was in a familiar hall that looked like an auditorium. Everything was painted, carpeted, or upholstered in purple. There were no seats, and no stage at the lowest tier, but stairs and landings leading to hallways out of the hall at each of the different levels, in all directions. One of the hallways up above me was marked with silver lettering and an arrow as leading to the “Floor 40 Terrace Apartments” which is where I lived.
I followed the hallway to some glass doors and stepped out into bright daylight and onto a moving walkway. It wasn’t a simple belt that propelled me in one direction. It was a series of swoopy-shaped clear plastic paths between spinning plastic circles that you could step off of in different directions to take different paths, but there was no moving in a straight line, or anything like it.
The swoops and circles were ridged like fingerprints, sort of like the metal disks in front of the department store elevator. It was good they were, because the whole path was taking me through a rooftop water park, and a foamy layer of soap bubbles coated everything. I was making my way across the roof to the corner of a terrace where I knew I’d find a door into the gray and white stairwell, my home, and hopefully I could get some sleep finally, and then I woke up.
