What I dreamed last night:
Grandmother's house so full furniture and knick-knacks and gypsies you could barely squeeze through the walkways. Then...
I moved to New York and while acquainting myself with my neighborhood, which was downtown, I somehow ended up on Saturday Night Live. It was the older, 70's version vibe though - basement feel soundstage, cheap budget, etc., but it had current players and Alec Baldwin, Steve Martin, and Jimmy Fallon made return appearances. I have no idea what I did in the show other than the final walk-out at the end.
After the show one of that season's new cast members and I were going to walk home together since we lived near each other. SNL was now on the outskirts of the city - downtown was off in the distance. It was morning. As we walked we talked about what it was like to live in NY, whether I would be on the show again, looked at the goods of the numerous merchant booths lining the streets, I realized I was going to have to get new clothes to fit in with the New Yorkers, and I wondered if I would meet my estranged best friend Chris who I knew lived in the city. We finally reached the guy's apartment and he was showing me around. I told him I had found out earlier that day that a friend of a friend lived a few floors below him. The building was very modern - all glass and the side of the building were terraced. As you stepped out onto the generous patio/deck, you couldn't see your neighbors or the patio below you. He lived on about the 5th floor. A large pool of water with fountains was at ground level. I looked and realized that we were still several miles from downtown, and that I needed to get going.
The common area of his floor was now a very posh concierge/shopping/dining area. It was packed with the wealthy and various people waiting on them. I remembered that to get to the elevator to go back down to street level I had to go behind the concierge's desk and in front of the showroom window with the limousine and the furs and tuxedos for sale. The Alfred/butler type man in full formal dress who had been buffing the limo when I arrived was now brushing the tuxedos and had a bunch of something on the ground around him. I picked my way past him and turned the corner into a decidedly low-rent back area of the building. It was a utility corridor - all concrete and railing and fluorescent lighting.
There were two normal looking doors that I realized were the elevators. The left one had a small down arrow on it and the other one had all sorts of weird markings and stickers on it. I pushed the call button and 3 or 4 people gathered while waiting for the car to arrive. When it did arrive, the guy to my right thought it would be funny to push the button again, sending it on its way before we could get on. He chuckled and apologized. The next one took forever to arrive. By the time it finally did, there were 20-30 people waiting along the railing. It looked like everyone was tired and ready to get home, so I could tell it was going to be a dash to get in the small elevator. I was already at the front of the line but I still jockeyed for position.
When the elevator door opened the first thing I noticed was that it was a combination elevator and port-a-potty (what a horrible, horrible design concept). There was a large woman in her sixties currently using the facility. She looked slightly embarrassed, but mostly resigned to her fate. As we started to file in, I next noticed that there was space for almost everyone - the elevator was unusually wide and there was space to file around and partly behind the molded in toilet. I had another ewww moment when I realized I was barefoot as I shuffled around behind the toilet. The floor was dry, but I couldn't see my feet. Still, I was barefoot in a public toiletvator.
(This is a good place to note that in my dreams elevators rarely if ever just do the boring up and down routine). As the elevator door closed, the third thing I noticed was that the elevator (suddenly) didn't have walls - just a waist-high railing. After the door closed we were looking at the backside of it and the now glass surrounding wall. Nothing happened for a minute, then the elevator gave a small lurch and descended unevenly about a foot while rotating slightly. Then it evened out and rotated some more. The elevator finally started moving - sideways. It slid against the short wall on a track. The elevator was also very flexible now. As it came to the corner of the wall it hugged the corner and slid easily around it. Right after it had straightened out again it came to a stop. We could see the shoppers through the glass wall in front of us.
The elevator finally started to go down, but not evenly. One side was bent lower that the side I was on. It was apparently the front, and i was in the back. This proved to be true when it left the building and was now moving swiftly forward through a wooded area on a rollercoaster track. It was very smooth and fast, but not too fast, and the track did have gentle hills and valleys and turns and dips, etc. My stomach dropped pleasantly several times on the twisting journey. Then...
I was overseas somewhere, Great Britain I think. I was with Todd's parents and we were in a large parking lot filled with cars next to a huge building like an airplane hanger. There were a ton of other people also walking around the parking lot. I started to get a feeling that something was wrong and that we should head for the building. I was trying to explain that to Todd's parents when the first one appeared in the sky - a vinyl Volkswagen pterodactyl. It was roughly the size and shape of an original Volkswagen beetle, with a head and a small beak at one end. Its skin was leathery and slightly glossy like vinyl, and it had stubby limbs with claws, but it did not have the large wingspan that a pterodactyl normally has, or had, I guess would be correct to say. After the first one landed, more arrived until the sky was quickly filled with them. People were running screaming now, and everything was chaos. John, Norma and I were ducking, trying to make it to the hangar building. Then on top of everything else it started to rain and hail.
At that point the dream faded and I woke up.
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