Pool.

Date: 11/4/2019

I can barely remember this dream but all I can see in my head is the pool to an old mansion/hotel. Except the mansion’s abandoned in the middle of nowhere. No servers / bellhops like you’d expect to see, nobody at the desk. Overstuffed chairs faded from years and years of sun sit in lobbies that were probably fun at one point, spilling stuffing from large rips and squealing with rusted springs when you sit down, letting up a puff of dust. Doors creak like in movies, the paint peeling off to reveal light bleached wood underneath, the doorknobs unpolished gold or silver and tarnished with age. From the vents you hear strange winds, sounds distorted that make you think of ghosts but are just really the wind from another part of the building. The walls all creak and groan, when the wind blows you hear it; a solemn, lonely sound, a dull howl against the discolored siding of the hotel which makes the old wood moan like ghosts in the pale daylight. The place still has windows and although they’re coated with as much dust as they can hold, they filter in the bleak sun, which in the dream seems to be hidden by clouds always. Never dark; never bright. That weird in-between lighting that comes in the fall time, along with the solid gray skies and the whistling wind, makes for a bored, old, lonely, and kind of sad feeling. Wandering through the halls isn’t like wandering through a post-apocalyptic place or anything; nothing’s like, destroyed, it’s all just old and bent with age. Beds sit neatly made and neatly dusted, your hands leave prints the same as they would in fresh-fallen snow. Dust mites float around in the air, seen in the sunlight that comes through the many windows. Again: It’s not scary, just sad. In the dream my sister, my brother and I were all outside of this hotel/mansion place, in a swimming pool. The outside was just as abandoned, with lawn chairs and umbrellas bearing thousands of spiderwebs as thick as glue, and the pavement sprouting with plants. The pool is somehow not as bad as it should’ve been for how abandoned the place was- the water was a bit murky but it wasn’t terrible, and you could still see all the way to the bottom. There weren’t even any plants or animals in the pool. Come to think of it there was really no life at all in that place besides my siblings and I; we never even heard a bird call or saw a hawk fly overhead. It was... nothing. And it felt so terribly, terribly lonely. We were kind of just playing in the pool for the entire dream but I remember thinking, something like ‘I wonder what it would be like to be all alone?’ because in real life one of my worst fears is loneliness. I also remember thinking that seeing us must’ve been pretty sad. The hotel was in the middle of an open field that stretched for as far as the eye could see. No phones (or anything that worked, anyways) were there so we couldn’t contact anyone. We were stuck, alone. And we were just three kids, whose laughter rang softly against the boundless air, fading quickly to nothing. I woke up feeling strangely nostalgic, home-sick, and most of all, sad and lonely.