No 17th Floor and Train Drop Off
I am in a building, a hotel maybe? There are multiple floors. I am on the 16th floor, I think that is where I live. I am a young woman with short blond hair. There are other young people who live on this floor. It’s like we are a family of some kind, although the appearance is more like we are all college dorm floor mates.
I become aware that there is no 17th floor in this building, or no 17th floor is listed. But I have a sense that it actually does exist, and there are authority figures that don’t want us to know about it. At some point, I am given a keycard that lets me access this mysterious 17th floor from the elevator. I try to do so, but an “adult” promptly finds me, scolds me and returns me to my floor.
Then I (as me, no longer the blond woman) am in the car with my wife. I am late for the train, and she has offered to drop me off at the station. It is night out. I can see my train in the station, waiting to leave. Another train pulls into the station, going the opposite direction. My wife is in the middle of saying something, but I don’t let her finish - I thank her and tell her I love her and I jump out of the car while she is in mid-sentence. I run up the stairs and halfway up I run into a concrete barrier. I can hear and see my train start to pull away from the station. Ah well, I’ve missed the train. I can wait for the next one in the coffee shop across the street.
Now I am the blond woman again, and I am walking back to the hotel. I am walking on a long concrete elevated platform that curves towards the hotel entrance. I still have the keycard for the 17th floor. I go into the hotel and get in the elevator, which takes me to the 17th floor. The elevator doors open, and I can see the Roman numeral XVII hanging from the ceiling, but backwards, so it can be read by people approaching the elevator. I am afraid to get off of the elevator and get caught by the adult again, but I do anyways. I turn left and I see a nondescript room where there are many people inside. They are all multiple copies of me and my friends on the 16th floor. They are all laughing and having a good time, and they invite me to join them. I am somewhat mortified - I don’t understand what is going on. Is this a factory where they make us? Are we manufactured? Or created in a lab somewhere? Why is there this floor with multiple versions of me and my friends? Did we come from here? What is the point of this?
As I wake up, I wonder if all the other floors of the hotel have single versions of me and my friends, supplied by the people on the 17th floor, playing out their own story lines.
Active imagination: I imagined asking the characters on the 17th floor who they were, what they represented. They said they weren’t specific people, but they could be thought of as potential. I asked if the 17th floor was akin to the River Lethe, or Styx. They agreed somewhat with this assessment. I enjoyed hanging out with them in my waking imagination.
Amplification: The Roman numeral XVII is an anagram for the Latin word VIXI: “I have lived”.
Drawing reflections: I used trapezoidal shapes for the building and the train station entrance. I don’t recall this shape in the dream, but it felt right to draw. The ghostly “adult” figure is holding up his hand to bar me from entering, while the young adults were holding up their hands as a sign of greeting and beckoning me in. Lots of dark blues, grays, black and white.
Questions I think about: Where was I going at night on the train? I usually take the train to work during the day. What was my wife saying to me in the car? How do these two settings (the hotel and the train station) relate to each other?
