#Dreaming of a bigger hotel

Last night’s dream was long, full-featured, and consisted of several elements I choose not to share in their totality in this venue (you all do remember the self-censoring filters I’ve imposed on what I write here, right?), but the final segment of the dream was delightfully entertaining and I feel safe sharing it with you.

Were I to outline the dream, I’d have to identify three main parts of it: 1.) jogging in downtown Indianapolis; 2.) conversations and interactions had with different people encountered during the aforementioned run, and ; 3.) returning to a fantastically expanded version of the Morris Hotel in San Antonio where I quarter in real-life and did in that silly dream, too.

In the final part of the dream I escorted a guest into The Morris, a guest encountered in an earlier part of the dream who was interested in becoming better acquainted with me, and embarked on a “ten-penny” tour of this joint. I do love this historic hotel, and I don’t mind “showing it off” to folks.

I should add that while I hold what is in my opinion the prime suite of rooms here, there are others that command a higher rent. Those suites on the outside corners of the front of the building, for example, with their great views of some of San Antonio’s most famous landmarks, are considered more valuable than mine, which happens to be right next to the largest laundry room in the hotel, and just a few steps away from the only designated smoking area for the entire building (yes, I smoke, and proudly) and is on the second floor, easily accessible by stairs on those occasions when the elevator is out of service, (much easier to go up and down stairs from my second floor apartment than those on the third or fourth floors, heh). But those on the front corners with the “better” views from their windows have always fascinated me, and form time to time I’ve been tempted to move into one of them.

In my dream…
I escorted my guest up the elevator to my second floor where I noticed a “tour” was in progress. Other guests were being escorted through the hotel. And I noticed that one of the front corner apartments on my floor was being shown. “C’mon, let’s take a look at this,” I told my guest. And we walked into the open apartment. Almost like Doctor Who’s Tardis, this suite of rooms was magically bigger on the inside that it had any realistic right to be. Designated as a two-bedroom suite, the individual rooms were the sizes of gymnasiums, at least.

In one corner room there was not only a spiral staircase leading down to lower levels but another set of stairs leading upwards to a door marked with a glowing exit sign. It could only be opening out onto a penthouse terrace of some kind or other. And the room itself was huge, simply huge.

Hearing voices off in the distance, I took my guest to another part of this suite of rooms where we found a multi-lane bowling alley with games in progress. And I don’t need to tell you how big a room THAT must have been to have a bowling alley in the corner of it!

Interestingly, the tourists who were being guided through the hotel (at least, this group of them; I suspected there were others) had been provided with toys that were occupying most of their attention. These toys were basically pneumatically operated hand-held cups that tossed ping pong balls a short distance up in the air then shut down, allowing the balls to be caught again. And the guests, all of them Japanese, were far more fascinated by these funky little toys than they were by what they were being shown of my hotel.

It was while watching them that my dream ended.

A 6th Floor?

Last night’s sleep treated me to a number of short, interesting dreams. One of them was set right here in my hotel.

In my dream…

…I walked into our residential foyer from the sidewalk, and waved at the new, uniformed security officer sitting behind a desk. After exchanging pleasantries with him, I headed over to the elevator.

When I stepped into the elevator I was shocked to see that the push-button controls and the present-floor indicator showed six floors! “WTF?!” I exclaimed, holding the elevator door open. This hotel only has five residential floors. How the heck could there now be six?

The security officer came over and asked me what was wrong. He nodded when I asked about the mysterious sixth floor. “That is something new,” he explained, and added, “Would you like to check it out?”

I stepped back as he punched a numerical code into a keyboard newly installed in the elevator wall. “Just look around from the elevator when the door opens up there,” he told me, “and ride back down to your own floor. No one’s allowed up there without a special invitation.”

When the elevator door opened at the sixth floor there were a number of men waiting to ride back down. As they filed in, I noticed that there seemed to be an upscale meet-and-greet kind of affair in progress. There were waiters serving drinks, there was a piano softly playing, and mostly business-suited men were standing in small clusters talking in hushed tones.

The last man in was more casually dressed, wearing a bright blue Polo shirt, and he nodded at me when he stepped in. I punched my floor number on the control panel as the door closed, and the elevator began its descent.

Who WAS that woman?!

Last night’s sleep was properly segmented, and the first such I’ve had in weeks. Some folks get all their nightly (or daily) sleep in one solid chunk. Sometimes I do, too. But usually my sleep is divided into two distinct parts: the first one being five or six hours long; and the second, coming sometime later in the day, is generally two or three hours long. And it’s this second sleep that usually contains my dreams. That was the case this morning.

In my dream…

…there was a higher degree of lucidity than is normally the case for me. This awareness that I was dreaming while I was in the dream manifested itself a number of times and finally allowed me to wake calmly from what would otherwise have been a rather disturbing situaton.

The setting of this dream was here in San Antonio. As a matter of fact, it began down in the residential foyer of the hotel in which I live.

As the door to the elevator opened, I found myself eye to eye with an attractive, smiling woman whom I apparently knew in the dream world, but whom I cannot place among the various women I know or have known in real life. I could see her very clearly, and heard the sound of her voice as we talked. I’m guessing that she may have been a composite of different individuals I know or have known. If I was an artist, (which I’m not, by the way), I could very easily draw a sketch of her.

She was headed out of the hotel as I was headed up to my apartment, but we decided to spend a little time together. We took a stroll down by the river, then rode the bus to a part of town where she was headed. At a number of times when we were walking and on the bus, things seemed more than a little strange, as they often do in dreams. When the strangeness would distract me from our conversation, I’d apologize to her, saying, “Oh, you’ll have to excuse me. I’m not usually this disoriented, but I’m dreaming.”

And she’d laugh lightly each time, telling me not to worry about it, that she understood completely. Then she’d put her hand on my arm or her arm in mine and I’d laugh, too. All would be well, then: happy and well.

When the bus finally dropped us off she used a pay phone at the bus stop to make a quick call. I looked around and realized that I didn’t know where we were at all. Looking back at where the pay phone had been I saw that it was gone, and so was the woman with whom I’d been spending time. The bus had pulled away. There I was standing in a strange place. But I realized that since I was dreaming, all I’d have to do is wake up and I’d know exactly where I was.

And that’s exactly what I did.

“Over 5,000 pieces!”

Last night’s sleep was rough: the GD sinuses kept waking me. But they never kept me up for long. One good thing about the sleep was that it was dream-filled. Though there were others during the night, the only dream I can remember in detail is the last one: the one that ended as I finally woke for good.

This dream was set in the Morris Hotel, where I live. Many of the folks I saw and with whom I talked in this dream are familiar to me, they’re my neighbors or staff who work here.

As it opened, the dream found me waking to construction noises coming from somewhere in the hotel. This is a common occurrence in real life, by the way. Ongoing renovation of this hotel, sometimes on a pretty large scale, is a fact of life which those of us living here have come to accept.

Rising from bed, I noticed that there was a lot of commotion out on the back patio. After bathing quickly and throwing on some clothes, I went out there to investigate. What I found was rows upon rows of framed paintings: paintings of all sizes and types. And there were several long tables loaded with boxes and stacks of books, most of them art books.

“You’re going to love this, Roscoe,” one of my neighbors standing out there told me. “There are over 5,000 pieces here!”

Looking up, I saw that more objects were being lowered by boom from one of the upper-story windows.

“How the blazes was he able to fit all this in his apartment in the first place?” I asked.

The guy I was talking to just shrugged his shoulders. “Well,” he said, “he did have a pretty big suite of rooms up there.”

I never did learn, in the dream, whether the art collector upstairs was moving out, and this was just a staging area for his stuff; or if he’d died, and his collection was being prepared for storage elsewhere; or if he was just in a “sharing mood” and had decided to give all this away. To us, his neighbors. I wanted to find out, but I woke up before I could ask about that.