Monday, May 28, 2018

lyme disease airbnb

For a discussion of some imagery from this dream, please visit this post in my blog preemie: my life's (a) dream.

Dream 1

I was walking or running or driving down a busy street, possibly in Denver, but possibly also in Houston. The light was an icy blue, like it was early morning, possibly in early spring or late winter. The road went down a long, moderate slope.

I knew I was in a hurry to get somewhere. I may have been in a hurry to get to some airport. But if I was walking, I knew I'd have to walk for a long time to get to the airport. And if I was driving, I knew I'd have to drive out of the city, through the desert mountains, for four hours before I got to the town with the airport.

I was going to some convention, possibly with my coworker RO. The first event of the convention was going to start soon. I had no idea how I'd travel for four hours, get on a plane, fly (to Houston?) and still be on time for the first event of the convention. Plus I still had to check into my hotel.

I suddenly realized I was on a baby blue Vespa scooter. This would make things a lot easier for me. I was driving the Vespa along on the sidewalk.

I stopped at an intersection. I looked around the corner, to my right. I saw a hotel like a Hampton Inn. It was a cheap hotel. But it looked nice, made out of heavy, peach-pink stone and with some sort of arched-out colonnade in front.

Suddenly I knew I was already where I needed to be, probably Houston. I may even have wondered why I'd thought I'd needed to do so much travel to get here. I knew this wasn't the hotel everybody who was going to the conference was staying at. But I figured I'd stay here. I'd stayed here before, probably with RO, on another business trip.

I went inside. There was a woman worker near the door, possibly sitting in a window well or sitting at a table, doing some kind of work, maybe computer or paper work, or maybe clipping her nails. She greeted me cheerfully but maybe somewhat distractedly.

I went to the front desk to check in. I thought the woman who'd greeted me would check me in. But another woman came out. She wasn't as nice to me. As she checked me in she said a few snide things to me.

I couldn't tell whether the woman behind the counter didn't like me because of the way I'd acted or something I'd said. So I decided to try and act nice and innocent. I said something about my suit for the convention and how I'd need to get it pressed after my trip here.

The woman said she had a room ready for me. I was expecting something in the building. But now we were in her car. She was driving me to the room.

We drove along a highway that overlooked some small neighborhood, like in some small town in the desert mountains. It looked like early winter here, too. There was frost everywhere. Finally we drove up into a neighborhood street, through a bunch of houses that looked a little like trailer homes.

I was sort of worried at this point. I thought I was staying in the hotel building itself. It would have been easy for me to walk to the convention from there. But I didn't have a car. It had been a far enough drive for us to get here. How was I going to unpack everything, walk to the convention, and still get to the first event on time?

The woman now drove through the house, through a living room, and then through a long room like a bedroom. There were lots of beds. But we stopped in a part of the room with three beds. The room was bright. It may have had a bit of a girly feel, maybe with a dollhouse somewhere. But it also felt sort of rundown and dingy.

The woman and I stood outside of the car. The woman pointed at a bed and said this was my room. I looked around. At first I thought I'd been put into some sort of dormitory or hospital room or mental hospital. But the place definitely looked like someone's house. I thought, All I wanted was a hotel room. Did she put me into an Airbnb?

The woman started walking back toward the front door, probably telling me some final things I'd need to know about my stay. We walked through some weird curtain that divided this room from another room full of beds. The curtain was like strips of fabric hanging down from the ceiling. They barely blocked the view of one room from the other.

The next room had three hospital beds. The hospital beds had hospital trays nearby. And some of the trays looked recently used. There may have been a cigarette lighter and an ashtray on one of them.

I asked, "Uh... Do I have this place to myself? Or will the people who live here also be sleeping here tonight?" This was totally not what I'd been looking for when I'd booked a room at the hotel.

The woman said, "Well, it's an Airbnb. People live here, you know. I mean, they said they were doing something else."

A woman who was older-looking and sort of tough-looking, with thick, square eyeglasses and short, unkempt hair, came up and said, "My surgery is happening this afternoon. That should keep us busy for a while."

The hotel woman said, "She got Lyme disease."

I may have noticed that the house woman had no hands, and maybe no forearms. But I also feel like the woman may have been wearing a long coat. So I may not have noticed this.

I was a little scared by the house woman. It felt like I was a little kid and she was maybe half my height taller than I. I turned to my right. Apparently this room of beds opened, along a wide wall (?), directly into the kitchen. The kitchen was wide, with a kitchen island in the middle. But it was dim and sort of rundown and cheap looking.

Some older adults were milling around in the kitchen, maybe preparing some food, smoking some cigarettes, etc. One of the adults was a balding man with a round head and face and probably a pretty big gut. He may have been wearing a kind of tight, white t-shirt that was worn out almost to translucency.

The adults started telling me about the surgery. Apparently the person getting the surgery was a young girl. Everybody was really worried about her. But they were all doing their best to act cheerful and optimistic.

I felt guilty. Here I'd been complaining and complaining about this hotel room or Airbnb or whatever it was. But the people who lived here were all really worried about this girl having to go into surgery. They were trying to be nice to me. And I hadn't been sympathetic at all. Couldn't I just stop being selfish and just try and be nice for a change?

I looked back toward the hotel woman, maybe to tell her that I'd take the room. She was also probably way taller than I, too -- again, like I'd somehow become a child or taken on a child's height.

The tough-looking woman walked back up to me. The hotel woman said, "She's seventeen."

I realized that the tough-looking woman, who'd told me earlier she was having surgery, was actually the girl everybody had been talking about. She was only seventeen years old. But whatever was afflicting her -- if it was Lyme disease (which I may have doubted) -- had impacted her so badly that she now looked really old.

The girl looked down to me and reached out her arm. I realized she wanted to shake hands with me. I suddenly didn't know what I would do. She didn't have any hands. But of course I would shake with her.

But I didn't know -- was I brought here to become the girl's boyfriend? Was I brought here to make the girl feel like she was still attractive?

I figured that right off the bat I would tell the girl I thought she was beautiful. And from then until the girl left for surgery, I would flirt with her. That way the girl would feel like someone thought she was cute.

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