some new place.

 We were on our last day of some trip and i think there were a bunch of us all ready to go home or there was some kind of instance where we were all separating for something and we stopped at some kind of new resort. The feeling is that everything was new to us, but we all knew each other as well. We were walking down a road which was from the main area where we were (camp?) and were walking by these beautiful, beautiful vistas. Like, AI generated, no way they are real on earth, no way that they are places that haven’t been photographed before. One girl looked over the ledge of one giant valley (it looked almost like a massive meteor had hit it, so deep and round in the earth but it was covered covered in greenery and a huge waterfall. It looked like the rainforest and/or Ferngully.) and yelled the typical “Hellloooo” but her voice didn’t come back in a standard echo, instead it came back slower and lower, like it had altered her voice to be this giant thing. And when she spoke a little bit after it, no one else caught it, but i noticed her voice had the sound of almost having a hint of that lower tint as well. People started getting uncharacteristically tired. Like falling asleep on the side of the road while we were walking (to the buses, i guess? From the camp?) and at first we just saw people laying on the side of the road and then we started noticing people with us (around us?) started feeling their eyes get tired. I started feeling it too, that burn around the rim of your eyes, but i was able to shake it away like it was a mental thing not an actual physically tired thing. This is dream logic, so when i’m talking about this group i’m in now, it’s both specific people and not specific people. There is one guy with me who i know and the girl who yelled into the valley. She looked vaguely like Piper from Orange Is the New Black.The guy had maybe young Chad Michael Murray vibes? Definitely Chad-ish vibes though.

The entire time we’re walking, people are kind of falling off and getting tired and some people notice it as a weird phenomenon and some others don’t, and the people that don’t are impossible to convince. And you can tell that somehow they are being dragged out into some psychic desert because they can’t be convinced of anything and they start to notice less and less as the day goes on. There’s a point where they don’t even remember the people falling asleep, even as our group went from “many people walking from a camp to the waiting buses” to only 3-10 people left. And we find this almost, like, abandoned western movie set and we stop to rest and get our feelings about us. We don’t know where we are and we kind of realize we’ve been following this path forward but no one has been leading us and/or we each thought the other people knew where we were going. The dude and i go into one of the buildings and you can tell that the movie set was only meant to be the outdoor part of it, because when we are in there, it opens up almost to an office building lobby, kind of like… Mr Robot? Where he works? But a huge tile and marble lobby with chrome walls and dark, low light in there and we are like okay, i think we’re in something we’re not supposed to be in. but we see “Hot Girls” walk through one door. These girls are not with us at all, they are in, like, night life attire. They also don’t feel like they should be here. Torn between the western movie set which in an outdoor region where people were randomly falling asleep and the unknown of an office building where we saw new people wandering into the organs of the place, we chose to follow them. “Out there” seemed to be some kind of endless procession where we would get nowhere. The buses were never coming.

When we’re in the office building hallway, it feels almost more like a museum? The way the hallways are laid out moreso leading into bigger rooms and spaces. I guess an office building could work like this but it wasn’t standard cubicles. Everything was lit from within these rooms and these spaces, and there was a lot of darkness accented with neon ambient lighting (floor lighting, ceiling lighting). We could hear a lot of people talking but even looking into some rooms, we couldn’t really see people in the rooms. A couple of times we would see groups of 2-3 people kind of huddled together in small black groups, couldn’t make out specific shapes, but it looked like they were huddled together talking to each other. 

We meet up with the group of girls and there are like 7 of them. There are a lot. Maybe the number keeps shifting. They are loud and drunk and you can tell they have forgotten where they are or how they got there. We ask them about what this building is and they somehow admit that this place has been different for all of them, but they all seem to have the same concept that this is a place to have fun and get wild. In passing, someone asks if i can see a painting on the wall behind me and i don’t see anything on the wall and she’s like it’s fine only a few people can see it. Me and the guy sit on the floor of the office building and he says he hasn’t been feeling that yearning of exhaustion anymore, but that we are the only two left that we even recognize. I ask him, specific line: “can you hear when people are talking it’s almost like two tapes are edited together? Like there’s a *hasp* at the beginning and end of each sentence?” and i look over at him and he nods his head slowly, but he is looking like he is going to fall asleep right at that very moment. Heavy head, heavy eyes. I stand up and he is able to stand up with me and we join the group of girls in this big lobby (we are no longer on the first floor and i don’t know how i know this but that is an overwhelming feeling i get) and there are big couches and big pillars and there are low glass tables with drinks everywhere and now there are other guys there too. Some are just sitting around like it’s a lounge, some are wasted and talking to the girls, it’s like a good mix of “vibes” and i make eye contact with one guy and we both kind of know that we don’t want to get into any kind of vibe, we just want to keep moving and figure more out. I see a huge set of elevator doors and press a button and they won’t open and it won’t even register (no light up button or numbers above, no bing sound) and i start to act drunk and having fun and the other guy comes over too and he acts like its’ going to be a good time and most of the group follows us into the elevator.

In the elevator, i can hear thoughts. There are two lines of thinking, the person that’s there who is having a good time and everyone is kind of talking about who they want to hook up with and what they want to feel and the other half (i can’t hear who the thought is coming from but i can match it up if i give it enough time, kind of like trying to make out an image from far away and squinting your eyes, but in your mind) is like where am i is this a dream when do we leave here, where is [name] so i can tell something is going on. Outwardly, you can see people starting to match up and couple off and i see my friend with the tired eyes is trying to talk to me but he can’t get words out. He’s like almost drunk but hasn’t had anything to drink and i start to migrate over to where he is in this big elevator and girls are talking to each other like “what do they look like to you?” one girl laughs and is like “oh they’re just like two blank faces to me, just totally blank” and she runs her hand down my face like i’m not even there, just a display on a wall. And one girl grabs my face in her hands and she looks me like so deep in the eyes and says “i wish i could just turn your face… this way” and she holds my whole head and tries to, like, slowly snap my neck like she’s trying to turn a steering wheel counter clockwise and obviously my neck won’t break and when she realizes that, she kind of lets go and i understand that everyone is seeing in other in this very abstract way, heads sideways, blank faces, barely any bodies, some people are dead, some people are asleep, very abstract. And i look over at the guy who was in the lobby who understood what i was doing and he is just, like, some marionette puppet absolutely CRUMPLED in the corner of the elevator. And i don’t know where the elevator is going or how many people are in it because when i look around (kind of like looking around a corner of a hallway?) the people change but the voices are all the same.