Rather than a school, the dream begins in a hotel. Sometimes I am in what I assume to be my own room, others I am in the hallway outside of what I perceive to be my room. There is a trigger: but rather than an internal trigger (i.e. the sudden realization that need to get to class) there is an external trigger, almost always in the form of my cell phone ringing.
I answer, and someone I know is on the other end. Sometime it is a friend, sometimes it is my girlfriend, sometimes it is a family member. They always describe a situation in which I need to go meet them, nothing urgent really, and I agree to do so.
This is where it begins. It usually starts with a trip down an elevator that has many floor options, and I press what I assume to be the logical choice for making it to the lobby, but it never works out - from here there are a few variations:
- In one such dream, the elevator doors open and I am presented with a subway system, only instead of a small number of tracks and car options, it is literally an enormous underground area of dozens upon dozens of tracks in all manner of directions, each track only separated by the slightest bit of gap. The various lines are unintelligibly labeled, and I must rely on asking the attendant which one I should take.
Doing so almost always leads me to a new junction, with a new attendant, but I never experience the actual travel from one place to the next. I simply emerge, ask the next attendant which hop I should take next, and I step aboard. After a few iterations of this, however, I begin to grow anxious, much in the same way that I did in the high-school dream when I realized I wasn't able to make progress towards finding my class. - In another version, rather than an underground subway, I exit the elevator and am presented by a series of tube-slides. Not quite as large and ominous as the dozens of underground tracks, the tubes are less in their number of choices, and appear to be built into the very hotel itself. The other key is that there is no attendant, as I emerge from one tube there is a seemingly logical or self evedent next choice of tube that I take. Just like all the variations, I do not experience the travel through the tube itself, and after a few iterations, I begin to grow anxious with the inability to reach my destination.
- In still yet another version, the elevator only goes down as far as, say, the 50th floor, and forces me to exit. When I exit, I am presented with several other elevators choices - each one appears to service a particular set of floors - one might service upwards, reading 50-100, another dowards (50-25), and so on. The loop then is created where I select a seemingly appropriate elevator to continue downwards (50-25) towards my intended goal (Lobby), but I can never quite find an elevator that claims it will go all the way down. To make matters worse, sometimes I will enter an elevator that claims one thing (50-25) and emerge to find myself somewhere worse off (floor 70).
It should be noted that when the latter happens, it never occurs to me to get right back in the misleading elevator and at least backtrack to where I started and try a different approach - I simply accept that I am now further off track and attempt to pick a different elevator that might get me closer. And finally, as with all the other variations, a few repeats of this same process and I again begin to grow frustrated that I cannot seem to accomplish the simple task of leaving the Hotel to meet the person I promised I would go meet.
All of these variations express themselves to the same final conclusion - that is - I never actually make it to a destination and, just like the High School dream, I always just wake up feeling unsettled, but never really angry or scared, per se.
As with the high-school dream, I usually wake up and wonder why the simplest of troubleshooting techniques didn't occur to me, like asking someone else which set of elevators I should take to make it to the Lobby. Particular to this dream, it never dawns on me to use my cell phone to call for assistance, nor does it dawn on me that I should probably call the person back that I agreed to meet and apologize for taking so long, or even ask them for help - the idea that I even have the cell phone on me becomes lost the moment I hang up with them at the top of the dream and I begin my attempted journey to meet them.
