Internet Explorer is having problems. Each page waits for a minute before you can scroll or type; DSL melts into insignificance.What is the significance of dreams? My dreams lately have involved elevators. Elevators with no walls or proper floor, elevators where you have to pull chains to hoist yourself up, elevators that plunge out of control. I notice that many elevators in my dreams plunge out of control; when I step into an elevator in a dream, there is the constant background awareness that it means danger, risk; that it may go screaming downwards, and I have to concentrate to make it reach my floor in safety.
The buildings are always tall, floors reaching up into the hundreds.
I don't know what these buildings are. Sometimes they are a hotel, with long and interweaving passages, and grand staircases. I am always late for breakfast, and my favorite dish has been eaten, or they don't serve it anymore.
I used to dream that my parents' house had an extra floor, a level hidden to me since childhood but of which I have distant memories (only in the dream, not something that ever existed in real life). I find a doorway, a hidden entrance that must be squeezed through, and there I find the rooms and books from my childhood, the things hidden away and lost. I know that my mother would be angry if she were to discover I had discovered it, I had been up there.
Sometimes the hidden rooms and passageways are in my old school; sometimes I dream of school and know I have not studied for my exams, I have not been there in ten years (even so, the people from my class remain). Then I realize - such relief - I do not have to be there anymore. It doesn't matter that I haven't written my history essays all quarter. I am free to get up, walk out, and leave.
Still I hurry along the road, anxious to reach the train station, knowing they are following me.
