Last night's dream
In the dream, I was climbing a steep and free-standing staircase.
The stairs were a ladder with character, villainous for putting normalcy on a scare. Two people I recognized had either just finished a descent and stepped away at my arrival or had reached the platform at the top that led inside the dormitory. The stairs and platform had a hard plastic or metal mesh, maybe plastic-covered metal like builders introduced to playgrounds in the last two decades. That I could see through was the notable thing. Because being terrified is notable. There was no railing on the left side, just stepping into space and falling, because falling equals disbelief plus realization plus dropping, and a skinny metal rail on the right side, my bad one. Had the rail been on the left, I could've grabbed tight unconsciously all the way up, reasserting my sense of balance with every step, compensating mentally for a thorough-going lack of real balance. The right side was disordered and problematic.
My two contexts here had been years ago. The first was the stairs at my uncle's old townhouse in Florida. I could see between the stairs. Everyone could see between the stairs, but other people didn't seem as affected. Where the back of each stair should've been was nothing, and incorrectly stepping so as to slip through was physically impossible but mentally undeniable. And while the dream's stairs were never clear about backing, the ground below was obvious enough in the mesh.
The second context was the stairs from grade school. Basement to first floor to second, the circuit upward had the width of a two-car garage (as conceived, obviously, by a grade schooler) and came in bunches of two dozen (similar conception applies) with center railings but no wall.
For the early years on them, when walking alone, I clung to the right side and hurried so not to fall — disbelieving, realizing and dropping into the stairwell's abyss, bouncing downward, then off the Blessed Sacrament wall and hurtling around the corner as surely had to occur with my childhood momentum, incorporating disbelief and realization temporarily into regretful understanding, dropping hard into the next abyss, a tumbling flight past a teacher or kindergartner in a peripheral hallway who would be horrified, race to my body and report a vain and guilty battle with gravity, tragic for the little stair-prophet who tried.
Last night's dream came on a college campus. That dream setting has been recurring for me. I was late for a class I hadn't known until that moment had my enrollment or even existed. I crossed the campus to get books I must have left in my room, and the staircase appeared to be the only way inside. I began the climb, and I shook myself awake.
