Writing Challenge Week 2: Dreams

This week’s writing challenge theme is dreams; not necessarily dreams you have while sleeping, but that’s what I wrote about today. I hate reading about other people’s dreams, so if you do too, I understand; carry on with your day. I will say though, that for about a year now I’ve been having very vivid dreams thanks to going back on Cymbalta. They run the gamut from nightmares to good dreams I don’t want to wake up from. Some of them have great narrative structures that I don’t want to wake up from because I want to find out how they end. This one from last night falls into that last category.

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I work in one of the top floors of the US Steel building in Pittsburgh. It’s lunch time, so two of my workmates and I take a series of elevators to the basement, where there is a restaurant. One of the workmates, Debb, wants to look at an art exhibition that’s displayed on the right hand side of the grand stair case that leads from the bank of elevators to the cafeteria, it’s by an artist she knows and she’s used some of the art in one of her work projects.

We go closer for a look and while Debb and the other workmate are crowing over the details in the piece, I get bored. I discover that the mitts I’m wearing, which have an inflexible board on the palm side, will actually help me float up in the air if I pump my wrists the right way and hard enough. I go higher and higher. I glide. No one thinks anything of this, which I also don’t find unusual. While I’m occupied with flying and my workmates are occupied with art, a small group of terrorists come out of the elevator bank and down the stairs toward us. We notice them threatening us and quickly go through a door at the bottom right of the staircase.

The room on the other side is a mirror of the room we have just left; kind of a grand foyer, but instead of a staircase, there is a series of desks arranged on platforms, like NASA control centers in the movies, except that this is the control center of a government intelligence agency. The people in this room know that we have just narrowly escaped terrorists and do their best to hold them off, but in the end, they break open a window at the foot of the desks and my workmates and I are thrown down onto an air conditioning block overlooking the street. We carefully jump down – I glide down with my mitts that let me fly – and go into the street, where lunchtime traffic is snarled and people are starting to gather to look at the spectacle unfolding from the building we just came out of, which is now swarming with soldiers in army green, some of whom have belayed down on climbing ropes from higher up in the building.

Debb and I cross the street to a large bronze memorial fountain. There are kids playing but also kids and parents starting to panic at what’s going on in the building we came from. I decide to glide down into the fountain and skim the water so the bronze design of the fountain/statue is between me and the building. Debb follows me somehow, and then I am helping her fly and glide. We fly further away and go higher, avoiding electrical lines coming off of huge transmission towers. Some movement of the terrorists down below make it essential for me to go from downtown to my ex-boyfriend’s in Oakland, where he is living in a house after moving out of ours and has recently broken up with a girlfriend. I fly over The Hill district and skirt the edge of a ravine, making my way into Oakland. I pass the Tower of Learning – almost at the ex boyfriend’s house – and then I wake up.

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Note that I actually did work in the downtown Pittsburgh in the US Steel Building and the ex-boyfriend in the dream (the one that got away) still works in Oakland for our alma mater, Carnegie Mellon. He also owns a house, though it’s not in Oakland. I played roller derby with Debb, though she’s a co-worker in the dream, and she is very interested in art.