"Seriously brain, what the hell?" A Thread For Weird Dreams and Nightmares

I'm not a lucid dreamer; the closest I get is whatever high-power imagining goes on if I am woken up earlier than I'm accustomed and doze off again.

I had a dream the night before graduation, which was only notable for the fact it's of a location I've repeatedly dreamed of that doesn't actually exist (as far as I'm aware). I guess it's more like a well-visited scene or setting rather than a definite physical location, because I tend to follow the same or similar script in it whenever I revisit it, and I've got two others which have cropped up over the years.

This particular one's an office complex. Big ol' jenga tower skyscraper type deal on the outside, like you'd see in any metropolis. I've never been outside it while dreaming, but I'm apparently familiar with where I am and not freaked out at the fact I'm in this building. I think I was in the lobby; it's hard to tell. The interior decor is all minimalist and polished black and barely any of it looks designed for people to be doing things there - despite it being something like an office complex, it's all hallways and corridors and stairwells and elevators and other spaces that happen between habitable spaces.

The place is deserted, but sometimes I know that I'm actively avoiding people. I wasn't sure which this run. I'm looking for something, but searching for that quickly becomes secondary to regaining my sense of direction amongst a whole bunch of samey spaces. No windows, so even less sense of even elevation which starts to make me uneasy, and finally leads me to an elevator.

The elevator's buttons immediately freak me out a bit, because there's 1-10, 100, then some weird and huge and impractical number like 3,333. Morbid curiosity makes me hit the last one, at which point an automated message says it'll take four hours or something to reach the selected floor.

Elevator gets moving with barely a whisper; I panic and start mashing buttons hoping that I somehow choose a floor between the ridiculous and wherever I'm up to now. The elevator walls themselves are scrolling up past the ceiling and back through the floor again, pulling the buttons temporarily out of reach. The ceiling and floor are getting closer together as well, like the whole thing's being compressed because of the speed it's travelling at.

Elevator stops somewhere in the hundreds. We're on a black roof covered in white snow under a cloudless sunless starless sky that didn't mentally register as either or day or night. I get a sick feeling as some companion I hadn't acknowledged at all up until this point slips over the edge - I don't see it, but I'm out on the roof and next thing I know I'm processing this information so I roll with it. There's no wind either but the narrative or something's informing me that we actually are a stupid amount of floors high - more floors than I knew the skyscraper to have.

The companion is presumed dead. Despite already being well away from the (sloped, corrugated) rooftop, I get even further away from the point my companion fell from and find a flat rooftop area. There are cartoony seal pups in there.


At this point, my dream ended. I realised that I've had dreams in that setting before, and I took one of the seal pups with me as I explored further up the tower. Despite being outside and on a roof before and not noticing it, the elevator does go up hundreds more floors, which eventually start being less coy about the fact they're in goddamn almost-space.

I have no idea why this place keeps showing up in my dreams, other than the fact my subconscious is a lazy motherfucker.