(This is just a dream journal entry, kept here because it goes with the previous item and I don’t want to lose it. No deep reflections here, but if you want to read it anyway, go for it.)
So there was of course more to the dream than I put in that write-up. It was a very detailed and packed dream for something that probably lasted in real time only a few minutes.
I was at a conference in Chicago. The entire dream took place in my hotel room, which had two queen beds, typical hotel furniture, and a very strange shower, which I’ll get to at the end.
In the dream, I had a girlfriend. It was someone that I really did date years ago, but I haven’t spoken to in maybe 20 years. Anyway, she told me it wasn’t working and that when we got back to Detroit, we wouldn’t be together anymore, but then she got that look on her face like maybe she was rethinking it again. We’d already broken up three times, always initiated by her.
So I was alone in this hotel room, and my belongs were strewn all over the place because that’s what happens after a few days in a hotel room. I needed to pack to go, but I also realized I hadn’t taken a shower, so I tried focusing on that.
But people kept coming into my room. The door wouldn’t lock right; the metal arm/hook thing that’s meant as a security device was broken (as it had been in one of the hotels we stayed in during the power outage), and the door itself wouldn’t latch, let alone lock.
I was simultaneously at a fantasy/scifi convention, a student field trip (where I was a chaperone), and a class field trip (where I was a student). And the people that came by were mostly reflective of that: Field trip directors looking for specific students, fellow teachers asking questions, and so on.
Two of the students in my class came by to hang out. They were all packed and bored. At first, it was two women, 20-somethings, one blonde and the other brunette. Later, I noticed that the brunette had become a blonde man, the twin brother of the other blonde. They were exchange students, from Finland or Germany, or something like that.
They were not bothering me, just talking to each other mostly, so I let them stay.
But as other people kept coming in and interrupting my attempt to get showered and packed, I started yelling more and more. The last one I remember was a little girl and her mother, just other guests at the hotel.
Anyway, after I finally got undressed (apologizing to the two who were there, but they didn’t care), I got into the shower, but this was by far the weirdest part of the dream.
The shower door was stone and had to be move out of the way. The wall around the shower was covered in some sort of rocky grit, gray, that came off onto my fingers when I touched it. There was a ledge that was just barely wide enough to step on, and then a short tunnel that went away and down into the floor, getting smaller until only after a few feet it would have too difficult to crawl into (had I tried). The water source was a constantly flowing waterfall, as if the hotel had been carved into the side of a mountain. There was no place for soap or shampoo.
That was when I’d woken up, wondering if my shower water was the waste of the rooms above me, and whether my waste moved on to floor below me.