Anxiety Elevator of the North

Last night I had a strange mashup of dreams.

What had started out as a kind of house inspection turned into a party and then a ritual. This involved me standing in a knee-deep circular pool of water and spinning like dervish.

Then.. At one point I was waiting for an elevator. Elevators in my dreams are usually bad things--they pulse up and down between floors after their doors open, which makes them difficult to enter or exit. Or they have difficulties getting to the top floor or the bottom floor; it's as if they have two floors they want to go to, two-and-a-half and nine-and-three-quarters. And there's always the possibility that they'll plunge to the bottom of the shaft at any moment.

This elevator was slightly different. It was more a personal lift. As the doors opened, a recorded female voice chimed, "Mind the gap." I should have been suspicious when the elevator floor, which was a square metal grate, was still inching up a little below the level of the corridor. I hopped in without thinking that this was a dream elevator. The elevator shaft was shiny metal and the metal grate sped up little. There were no buttons I could see on the inside, and square shaft was only about three feet wide.

Then it reached the end of the shaft. This was a kind of iron trap door. I had a second where I thought I might be smooshed between the door and grate, but I got it open. The trap door opened in the middle of a field. And the the platform grate kept going. The shiny metal shaft telescoped out of the ground with me looking out of the top.

I slid down the inside of the shaft before it fell over. I'm going to sidestep the obvious Freudian interpretation and say that this reminds me of the tarot card, "The Tower." Also, this was at the end of the ritual and it felt like some kind of earthy counterpoint to the watery dervish part earlier.