An Office Tour

Job interviews are always a pain. This dream started at the end of one such interview.

I left the room I was just interviewed in and passed through the waiting room, which was filled with men in business suits. I felt a bit out of place because I was wearing casual clothes, but so far everything was going smoothly.

 The hallway outside looked completely normal. People in suits buzzing around between offices and all that, none of whom payed any attention to me. Suddenly, one of the workers stopped down the hall from me and put his hands up to his face. Thin pieces of bone poked out of his mouth; more bone followed as a skeletal arm reached out. Soon it was followed by another, then a head and a long and thin body. Then it happened again.

Not one, but two pale white things stood in the hallway next to a crumpled suit with a wrinkled mass of skin inside of it. I'd say that they were skeletons but they weren't made of conjoined pieces. They were more like pliable white bone. Though they certainly looked odd, the creatures didn't seem hostile and didn't even really appear to notice me.

I almost thought it was going to turn into a bad dream, but it went back to being fairly normal. One of the beings picked up its suitcase and went to a photocopier to make copies of some documents that it held. It also faxed some things away. Meanwhile, the second being was casually drinking water down the hall. When the two of them were through they gathered up their skin and went into a bathroom, soon coming back out in their "disguise". Throughout this entire event not one person besides myself thought that something strange was going on.

Shopping

I was in a department store. Something that looked like a department store, at least. Everything had a feeling of being very open, like there were lots of windows on one side of the room.

A man in pinstripe pants and a lavender shirt came up to me and said he knew exactly what I would look good in. He recommended that I wear a red shirt under a red button-up with gray slacks; apparently looking like a doorman or a valet look good in dreams and passes for acceptable fashion. As I was leaving I was stopped by a manager (or who I'm assuming was a manager) who asked if I was looking for a job, but he immediately retracted his offer as soon as I said yes.

Disappointed, I decided to go outside. Everything that I could find outside of this one store was under construction, with crews of people constantly operating machinery and laying down bricks and cement. The only cars on the road, for example, were construction trucks hauling rebar around. I think a worker yelled at me about not wearing a hard hat in a construction zone, but it was too loud to make anything out for sure.

A Dark Place

This dream was a bit disorienting.

Everything was so dark that I could hardly tell what was going on. The buildings (if they even were buildings) were shades of dark gray, black, and blue. In fact, everything I could see was shaded dark gray, black, and blue. Even the “people” were.

They were barely visible in the dim light because they blended in so well with everything else. To be honest, just being there was depressing. I walked up to one of these people and asked for some information about where I was and it answered me. Though it answered me, I couldn’t hear it. I could see a slightly darker part of its face moving slightly yet no sound came out. I leaned against a wall and looked up at a vast blackness where a sky should have been and felt a hazy feeling wash over me. This hazy feeling hung over me for a while after I woke up.

A Nice Place

I was sitting on a large, rounded platform carved out of polished red granite that floated  in a clear blue sky. I was high above an empty sea with not a speck of land in sight; I was totally isolated on my granite platform, and I loved it. 

There was no sound save for the faint traces of churning water below and the hum of a soft but constant breeze. Maybe I was moving, maybe I wasn’t; there weren’t any real landmarks to be able to say for sure.  After enjoying the seclusion for a while I decided to test my personal limits of lucid dreaming. Starting small, I brought out a wooden stool to sit on and a beat-up guitar to play. 

The guitar wasn’t supposed to be old and worn down, so that’s probably something I need to work on. When I actually got around to playing it, the sound was off and I realized that the strings weren’t even in the positions that an actual guitar would place them in. It still sounded nice, however, so I left it as is and tooled around playing some tunes for a good long while.

Sleepover

The dream started with some friends of mine coming over to spend the night watching movies. Five people showed up, and we put on a cheesy-looking old horror movie. Most of the time was spent talking and poking fun at the quality of the movie we were watching and eventually I felt like taking a quick walk to get some fresh air. I got up and walked out onto the porch and noticed that I wasn’t even at my own house. The overhang to the porch was almost like a patio and the grass in the yard was more like dark green leaves; instead of houses, the neighborhood was a road passing between fenced-away fields of tall grass. As I walked I felt and heard it rain, but I didn’t get a sense of where I was going. For that moment I was just moving through the rain.

When I got back home, a few of my friends were already sleeping, and the ones who weren’t asked me where I had wandered off to. Apparently I had been gone for over thirty minutes, not just one or two. The movie was over and it was getting late. The dream segued into the morning. My friends were still present and accounted for and we were still in the same house with the small patio out front. However, we were all in the backyard. I wanted for our group to explore by hopping some fences and checking out what was past a line of trees but nobody else wanted to go along with me. So I settled for just walking up to the fence and checking out as much as I could from there.

To the right of the house was a massive lot filled with tall and faded yellow grass and spindly white trees, one of which branched off so many times from its trunk that it looked almost like a blossom of bones rising out of the dead grass. This was the field I wanted to pass through, but quickly I noticed several objects showing just over the top of the swaying grass. 

Gravestones.

The yard next to us was a massive and degrading cemetery. While I felt that would only make exploring more fun, my friends disagreed and I moved on to check out the yard on the other side. To the left of the house was a small pond, filled with algae. A dream character (I want to say it was a man in a wading suit, but I can't picture him clearly) appeared and started to explain to me that the lake we saw was the only natural lake in the state. He motioned me towards the boat, telling me that it was a swamp boat designed for easy travel in shallow water. It was at this point that I realized that somebody was watching TV in the house and the sounds of what they were watching were bleeding into my dream. I got in and paddled around for a bit and as I was doing laps around the small “lake” I noticed two things; there were no fish in the water and the pond was actually cut off from the main lake by a fence. Every so often I would see a ray nonchalantly swim past the fence. What really got me, however, was that the fence was an ordinary chain-link fence. What kept the lake from flowing into the pond was some kind of clear plastic that coated the fence and extended out over the surface of the lake for a few feet. It was flexible and bulged up with the tide.

Suddenly I found myself in a stone auditorium that was lit by a glowing fungus that was dotted all over the ceiling and on a few rocks around the edges of the room. There were other people seated in there with me but I could not recognize them and my friends were nowhere to be found. There was an exit to my right but I was a bit reluctant to take it. I had no idea where I was, where this tunnel led, or what could possibly lay waiting inside. So I sat in the pale glow of the fungus and peered into the tunnel. I could not see anything but I could hear small rocks clattering. The way they sounded was like somebody rolling stones around as if they were dice; they’d quietly echo off through the tunnel for a few seconds before dying down and resuming a few moments later. They didn’t really sound like they were getting closer, either.

Soon enough I mustered the will to go into the tunnel and was cut short; the feeling of blackness surrounded me and I woke up. Afterwards, I tried using a DEILD to get back into the dream in a completely lucid state but I didn’t have any luck.