Dreamworld Elevators

I love vivid and lucid dreaming: they're side effects of my superpowers. A common theme in my dreams are elevators: I dream about them when my brain has something to say about my career, when I think I have one.

The library elevator, for instance, is a plate of glass suspended by wires that connected to a single wire overhead. Several of us ride that elevator at the time, clinging to the cables, not speaking to each other. We are silent with fear. The elevator has no shaft, it just moves up and down without reason or command from floor to floor through empty blackness, and you leap on and off when you can. It is so dark. Just books and blackness, steel and glass.

Hospital elevators are narrow and a nasty shade of mustard yellow. They're boxy and vinyl, and a great place to hide from the man with the gun. They do not go all the way up or down, and I have to run down a hallway to transfer to an identical elevator to get anywhere. They go several floors underground, but do not go back up.

The stage elevator is a variation of the theater ladder. I dream I work in a theater, and there are different ways of getting where I need to go: one of the ways is by a ladder nailed into the cement wall of a very narrow shaft that goes several miles underground, and requires some clever climbing, as it changes angles. The elevator is safer, and I much prefer to use it, though it doesn't go as far. It's as wide as a room, made out of plywood, and the buttons are rudimentary in a handheld device like you see in movies for window washers. Because it's so wide and made out of wood, the floor of the elevator bends and creaks when someone stands on it.

In my dreams, hotels and shopping centers always have elevators, as do apartment buildings. These elevators are usually round, made of steel, only fit a single person, and they give me vertigo. They never go to the floor I want, or the floor I live on. I'm terrified of these elevators, but I can't remember any other way to get home. In office buildings (usually near potted ferns), the elevator will require a quarter or three-quarter twist before the doors will open.

Recently, I dreamed that my seventies-era cement apartment building suffered a violent thunderstorm that cracked and shook it. When I returned from my place of safety from the flood, trees and vines were growing through the tan carpeted floor and cinderblock walls, and water dripped down the insides. The glass elevator shaft was cracked and bent into an angle, and the steel and glass elevator was stuck on the second floor (think Portal 2). I turned to the secondary shaft and crowded into the elevator car with twenty or so of my housemates - fellow students. We rode the elevator to the fifth floor, but nothing looked stable to me. I could see cracked cement and warped metal everywhere, and greenery and sludge seeping in. I asked them to let me off, and it was a great relief to escape, even as high as I was already. They wanted to go to the top, at all costs. But I knew better than to try.