Lucid Time!

Don't know what's come over me, just had the impulse to share some dreams agian, even if they aren't that interesting.

In dream, I am much older, and have a wife and (I wanna say five kids, somewhere between four and seven.) I am supposed to take the kids on vacation in Chicago (specifically stated that the city I'm taking them to is Chicago.) My wife, whoever she is in-dream is on a buisness trip and will be laying over in Chicago on her way back from wherever for a couple days. I am to head out there the same day she lays over, then we all return home as a family.

I arrive at the hotel. It is my responsibility to check in to the hotel so what when my wife arrives later in the day, she can just go straight to the room and relax. The building I am staying in is this extremely tall and thin orange tower that is built outside the downtown of the city alongside this open park area. The building does look rather unusual because of its bright orange color and isolation from the other, taller buildings.

The inside appears rather normal, though it has a courtyard like a mall with a confusing collusion of escalators and elevators leading to rooms and shops. There is some complication at the check in desk, apparently the fault of the hotel's employees rather than myself, and my room will not be ready for a couple more hours. I have to inform my kids (much to their dismay) that we will have to go outside. (It is currently a blizzard. Apparently this same blizzard has also delayed my wife's incoming flight.) The hotel employee (I think was a robot by the way.) Tells us we may use the swimming pool in the meantime.

It is at this point that I remember seeing the kids most clearly. They all looked rather ubiquitous. They all seemed to have the same hair (albeit in different lengths and styles) the same faces and expressions, etc. The funny thing was they would all follow me like ducks in a row, with the tallest child (looking to be 10-12ish) in front and the youngest (maybe 5-7ish) in back, creating a steady slope of reducing height.

We go up to the pool near the very top of the hotel. It is in a glass enclosure and is also structured like an indoor courtyard with rooms and indoor balconies proceeding up several stories above it. The kids begin playing this game about throwing plates. I am concerned that they will injure themselves and am reluctant to let them play until I discover the plates have rounded edges and are made of plastic like light frisbees.

Eventually we are able to return to the room and order room service, and the wife character arrives. This part of the dream was largely glanced over and I think the wife and children characters were dropped completely after this point.

I got a call that I had to make it to some kind of business meeting. I had to traverse the city to an office building on the other side, but the roads were closing due to the weather and people thought the electricity might go off. However there was a subterranean network of hotels, shops and casinos that one could traverse to make it to the other side of the city.

Navigating the network turns out to be frustrating. It is structured more around providing ample shopping opportunities than it is around providing an actual means of reaching two points in the city, and I frequently have to stop and check maps (that of course due to the fact that this is a dream, change). At some point I start using elevators. By going up elevators I can go to the top of buildings and get an idea of where I am at in the city and at the same time cross over some obstacles by moving to another elevator while above ground. But irritatingly, the elevators connected to the subterranean tunnels only link to the top floors of buildings.

At some point, I manage to find a station of this (I guess you could call it a mass transit system.) They were kind of like mini elevated rail trains that moved along on this rail, only they hung from it, and the gondolas were small (only allowing 4-6 people in each one) and were sphere shaped, with different colored gondolas arriving in a rainbow succession.

The dream concludes with me giving up getting to the business meeting. (The meeting is canceled on account.) I am in a starbucks coffee on the top floor of a skyscraper that is essentially an all in one college. All of the dorms, offices and classrooms are built into one tower.

The Starbucks is run by two aliens (like classical depictions of martian aliens, with skinny bodies, big heads, and big black eyes.) Though one of them is dark gray and the other is green. I think there is also a human employee.

Something funny happens with the aliens, like the dark gray one only serves earl gray and black tea and the green alien serves you green tea. I think I wind up getting two cups of tea, one from each alien.

My friends H and A are there and they are talking about the plants in the greenhouse that takes up the other part of the top floor of the tower. They want me to come see the plants with them and then they start arguing if fallout 3 or new vegas is better and I break them up. Manei appears (though I remain nonlucid. ) and takes a sandwich from this refrigerator and sits down with it and puts too much mustard on it and I think it is gross. A goes up to him and punches him in the employee in the face and his head goes into a vat of ice cream. I wind up breaking up that fight too.