==> ??: Be
You haven't been here long. You don't feel like it's been that long at least.
You woke up in your bedroom.
The door exited out to a hallway you hadn't expected.
When you used the bathroom's connecting door that would ordinarily have led.. well it exited out to a separate hallway in the same building.
You would later find that to be a hallway on another floor entirely of the same place.
You decided to use a couple items to set them down in each hallway, and closed the doors. If there were non-euclidean space shenanigans going on you wanted to make sure you wouldn't be stranding yourself somewhere other than the two rooms you knew from previous experience. Maybe it was paranoid. It gave you some sense of order all the same.
When the doors opened you found the same two hallways with the same cd cases respectively on the floor of each.
You found the floor number when getting to the stairwell, and following it down, and following the hallway around you eventually found the other door to the rooms you knew. You had a circuit you could traverse of the place. You were building a mental layout of how the building would be structured.
It felt familiar initially, but you knew it as the layout of a hotel you'd stayed at.
You always liked the wallpaper they used. It exuded comfort in a way you can only describe idiosyncratically, as though the designer and you had the same understanding of a platonic ideal for the atmosphere you experienced. It makes you sound like a snob to even describe what it was that you liked. You could itemize it to the abstract. Floral motif, peachy sunset palette, but for the most part?
When you lost focus just like a dream those details bleeded away into a perceptual space you can only compare to your peripheral vision.
Nothing outside of your focus matters.
You come to realize you've dissociating in the lobby. You're in the lobby. The hotel lobby. This place is a hotel.
You tried waiting in the lobby by the front desk. Nobody had come out to the desk. You never liked to bother staff at a business by ringing the bell. It felt self-important to do so. You could just wait.
You eventually got tired of waiting and rang the bell.
There was no response.
It felt wrong, but after getting tired of checking your phone for any change in a lack of signal save for the one connecting you to the PC in your room (weird that the bluetooth hadn't stopped working at any point, but you still have that), and ringing the bell a second time.. and a third.. and waiting.. and ringing it again.. okay you were definitely done waiting.
You went around to the other side of the front desk.
You went back and found a schedule for staff on the wall. No names, no times. Just empty slots.
You left and went to check if the kitchen was stocked.
You had suspicion finding the complimentary buffet of the hotel stocked with fresh offerings.
You decided to go back to your room at that point.
Everything was as it had been.
You hadn't heard a single person. The speakers around the place played music, but periodically it would stall out to a lull in what had been filling the silence. The lyrics were mostly familiar. You hadn't heard a song you didn't at least distantly recognize, but nothing you'd have put in a 'favorites' playlist had made its debut.
You lock the doors that would exit out to the hallway. You check the closets of both your bedroom and the bathroom. No additional hallways but the two points of access. You hoped this was more of a dark comedy and less of a strict horror movie you could end up experiencing.
You dug through your things to find that old secure packaging that you'd have to carry anything purchased at a dispensary inside. They were useful for storing stuff if you didn't have a dedicated drawer or whatever. You took a mixed thc-cbd dose, like 10mg? The important part was having picked out one of the indica dominant gummies. You could turn on the tv, play some billy hatcher, wait for it to kick in, turn off the tv, and then lay down. Get comfy get cozy..
Your dream... yeah there's the lucidity fuck yeah time for weird bs I'm choosing..
Huh..
That's the hotel. Something makes you feel at home here.
You don't fully remember if you only stayed at it the one time, or not.
Weird to dream about it while you're there, right?
There's also some.. place. Whatever's past the archways is.. colorful.
It reminds you of being at a park for a fair event.
It feels like something is about to happen within this dream.
You're reminded of the part of campus where the psych building was.
You're simultaneously reminded of the theater building on campus.
The two superimposed and you don't know why the dream is like this.
==> ??: Dream of ()
==> ??: Wake.
