Today has gotten off entirely on the wrong foot for me. I woke up and found that my wife had dyed her hair sometime yesterday, but I guess I didn’t notice? I remarked on it and she went off on me and my (admittedly) terrible attention span. Then work was completely incomprehensible to me. I had trouble logging into the blog, as well. I suppose they changed the URL and the password. I would’ve thought they’d tell me about something like that, though.

 I suppose it’s because I didn’t sleep well last night. I had the oddest dream. It was one of those dreams that starts so mundane and normal that you almost don’t realize you’re dreaming at all. Like when you keep dreaming that you can’t sleep, or that you keep waking up. But my dream was not quite like that.

I dreamed I woke up to go and get a drink of water. I walked to the kitchen in the dark and filled my glass and drank, and then on the way back I noticed something odd. A gleam of gold, right where the light from outside fell on the hallway wall. I looked again, and saw nothing, but when I moved something changed.

It was as though there were angles to the dim light. Like a corner made of light, and when I walked to the side I saw something that had been hidden behind it.

It was a door. It was wooden and white and it had a gold handle. In the dream it did not seem odd to see it there at all. It was as though it belonged there. But it was (I think) in the middle of the hallway where no door should have been.

I set the glass of water down on the floor and opened the door. I’m not sure why, but in the dream it felt as though I had to. I vaguely remembered something Dan had said to me, but in the dream it did not seem to matter.

Inside it was a small, empty closet. The walls were bare and were lit by a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. On the other side of the closet was another door. This door was brown.

I entered the closet and took hold of the next door’s knob and turned it. Behind that door was a short wooden hall. The walls and ceiling and floor were made of the same planks of graying wood. Suddenly it was impossible to tell the floor from the ceiling at all. And the hallway seemed to shrink, like within a few feet it would be only inches high, yet I could not see where it ended.

I stepped into the hallway, and it did not shrink around me. I walked down it a few steps and then I found there was a four-paned window on the left-hand wall. I looked through the window and saw that it looked out on another window, only several feet away, like two houses set side-by-side. What was in between the two houses, so to speak, was impossible to see. Everything was black. It was as though the other window was hanging in space.

Inside the other window was a kitchen and a dining room. I saw a table set for dinner, and at the table were two people. They seemed to be a man and a woman. Their faces, though, were strange. Their skin was pale and their brows and cheeks bulged horribly and their eyelids were fat and puffy and somehow smeared, as though they had been badly made out of clay. Their eyes were invisible, hidden behind their swollen brows, and their noses were pinched shut, and protruding past their upper lips were the hints of thin, yellowed teeth.

On their plates was something brown-red and mangled and gleaming. The man-thing reached into his meal with trembling fingers and took a handful of the red mass and dribbled it across his chin. Their faces seemed immobile, like they could never open their mouths and thus never eat, and so their dinner was a sad and terrible thing to them. Then the woman-thing noticed me watching them through the window. She touched her husband on the shoulder and he looked at me, face dripping. Then they both stood and solemnly watched me, staring out the window into mine.

For a moment I thought it was myself and my wife standing there. But it could not have been, and so I left them and passed down the hallway.

I came to another door. I opened it and found myself in a house. In the dream it seemed to have been decorated in the nineteen-sixties. The wallpaper was plaid and the carpet was a shaggy brown and all the couches were teal. The rooms were poorly lit by candlelight, as though the power was out. I walked throughout the house and soon began to think it was familiar.

It was my house, or at least the layout was. It matched exactly.

I went to the bedroom. The bed was made up in white sheets, and in the middle of the bed underneath the sheets was a person. It was hard to make out in the dark, but they seemed to be in the fetal position on their side. Something black leaked from what I thought was their face. It pooled in the middle of the bed like oil, and they did not move.

I went into the living room and looked out the back door. The yard was lit by the moon above, though it seemed bigger than normal. A man was standing in the middle of the yard, facing away. His arms were dripping black up to his elbows and he was shivering, though it did not seem to be from cold. I watched him for a moment and then returned to the door and passed through.

It was the hall again. I stopped once I had entered and looked back and saw the door no longer opened on the dark house but instead opened on the stars themselves. I did not think on it and instead walked on to the next door, and the next, and the next.

I opened one door and found myself in a winter forest. It was full of cries and firelight and I found a gathering somewhere in the trees. There were figures around a bonfire there and they feasted upon something I could not see. I remember being unable to count their arms, and their words made no sense to my ears. They did not see me and I passed on to the next door, which was set in a tree trunk.

I opened one and found a place of deep darkness, of darkness so great that we who have seen light cannot begin to understand it. There were things in the darkness, singing, and they somehow saw me and sang to me of things hidden behind the horizon. I blindly felt before me and somehow found a doorknob and pulled and passed through.

I was in an empty office building, standing in a floor of cubicles. It was night and all the lights were off except for a few. Someone was snoring in a cubicle nearby and they muttered in their sleep, but I could not hear but they were saying. I went to the next door.

More and more things opened up before me. Caves of black glass with ragged people huddled together on the floors. Mountains of light with hearts of bleak, red glows. And once a vast, frozen field under red stars, and there were things moving above me in the field, giant things that walked over me and took no notice of my watching. They were so great I could not fully see them. But on the far corner of the field there was a hut, and outside of it was the form of a man. He seemed greatly agitated and screamed madly at the sky for something, but I could not tell what, and he began to weep bitterly and I left him.

More and more doors. It was as though I was in an endless hall of endless doors. And there were figures moving among the hall with me, ones that did not pay any attention to me as they entered the doors themselves. I did not recognize many of them, but some of them I almost felt I knew.

Some of them, why… Some of them almost looked like me.

It seemed as though I walked for a long time. Until finally I found myself in my own hallway. The glass of water I’d set down on the floor was gone now, though. I turned around and found the door was gone as well. I got myself a second glass and then returned to bed.

It was such an odd dream. I’ve never had one quite like it.

It’s set my whole day wrong, though. Work made barely any sense to me at all, and why is there nothing on the news about Shanghai? It seems odd that they’ve stopped reporting on it.