The Spiral Staircase

I just had the weirdest dream.

Since Lisa and I separated, I've been taking it easy for the first time in years. I've had difficulty sleeping for a long time and I thought I'd take the opportunity while she's away to catch up on it; so, I've been spending a fair amount of time in bed. Because I've been unable to sleep well, it's also been a while since I've had vivid dreams; lately, I've been having quite a few. Strangely, a lot of them have been about working on botched home renovations with Mike Holmes.

I think I've been having a lot of dreams about working with Mike because, watching Holmes on Homes and reading his book Make It Right (Lisa got me that for Christmas :)), I've learned a lot, not only about building, but about why today's homes are often not nearly as well built as homes built when I was little. Even before I knew what I know now, I noticed that modern homes just aren't as solid as older homes. I've always wondered why; now I know.

Anyway, that's how this dream started out; I was working on a site with Mike. It was this huge room with a concrete floor and a high ceiling, at least 12'. The ceiling was unfinished even when we first came in and the finishing that was there was pretty slipshod. I remember noting that the seams in the drywall were uneven and weren't taped. Mike and his crew were busily tearing down the drywall and Mike was complaining about how flimsy the structure was.

At one point, Mike calls me over to a wall he’s been pulling the drywall down from. The studs seem to have a layer of plywood on the cold (exterior) side and there's no vapor barrier. Mike is upset because, in addition to all that, there’s this huge gap in the wall around what looks like what used to be a door with a window above; there’s a huge draft coming in. He calls me over to check it out; I can feel the cold draft coming down. "That's not even insulated," I comment.

"I know," Mike replies. "That's why I wanted you to see this." He walks off, grumbling.

I turn to follow him. I wanted to ask him why he thinks someone would put up an exterior wall like that with no insulation whatsoever. As I'm walking, I catch movement out of the corner of my eye. I turn back and the entire section of wall we were just working on is falling in right towards me. I put up my hands to shield myself and hopefully catch the wall before it beans me. I brace myself.

I barely even feel it when it hits. It turns out to be made, not of plywood as we first thought, but of thin, low-grade paneling, not even 1/8" thick. The whole thing is as light as a feather, and even flexes a bit when I catch it. Mike asks if I'm OK. "I'm fine," I say. "This wall's all paneling." So I set it down and Mike and I both turn to look at the hole left in the wall.

It wasn't an exterior wall at all, as we had thought. Through the hole was another, long room, maybe 24' across and 8' deep. We could see some kind of concrete pillar in the center, and the walls were made of concrete. We went in to investigate. On closer inspection, however, we realized the room wasn’t made of concrete at all; the gray substance was a thick layer of dust. What we thought was a concrete pillar was actually some kind of wooden spiral staircase.

I slowly started up the stairs; Mike followed me. I commented that it looked like the room had been sealed for like 70 years, like something right out of The Changeling. I didn’t know what to expect to find, but I had a weird feeling we were going to find a body up there. However, when we got to the top of the stairs, suddenly there was absolutely no dust. Everything was completely clean. It was like a complete little apartment.

As soon as I saw the clean apartment, my first thought was there must be some other entrance to this place than the stairway. I started to look around for one; Mike waited at the top of the stairs, looking around from his vantage point.

The stairs opened onto some kind of little living room. The structure of the room was unusual. The spiral railing of the staircase dominated the center of the room and the doors formed a circle around the staircase so you could look into them all right there from the top of the stairs The rooms and hallways beyond were conventionally shaped, but this room was round. The walls actually curved with doors to each room all around you.

There was a small TV, 1960s/70s style (looked a bit like this one but smaller, maybe 12"), turned on to some news program on a little stand against the wall at the top of the stairs. One door opened onto a tiny hall behind me. The first room on the left in that hall was a door opening onto a bedroom. There were children’s toys scattered about the room. I looked down the hall. Doors opened onto a couple of other rooms but there was no other entrance there.

So I turned right. More rooms. I couldn’t see into all of them well, but they all had light coming in as if from windows and the size of the rooms and the light suggested that they couldn’t have doors going anywhere, either. Even if they did, this stairway we’d just came up was wide open with this hard to miss spiral railing in the middle of the living room. Why didn’t whoever lives up here use them?

Then I looked into a bedroom just around the corner from the stairway. There was a man laying on the bed, maybe in his 40s or early 50s, balding. Something about the look on his face as he slept made him look child-like. I had the impression he was mentally handicapped. He was sound asleep so I thought, well this is apparently his place; I don’t want to disturb him. So, quietly, I tiptoed back down the stairs, Mike ahead of me.

When we got to the bottom, we both looked up the stairs. Like the apartment, they were suddenly clean. More than clean, they were beautiful, dark brown, stained, polished wood.

I started to turn to Mike to ask him if he was seeing what I was seeing when, as we watched, the dust slowly started to re-appear. Over about 10 seconds, we watched in amazement as the room around us went from clean and new to covered in dust, just as we found it except, in the dust on the stairs, Mike and I could see our footprints on the stairs and hand prints on the banister where we rubbed off the dust on our way up...

The last thing I remember is looking up the dusty stairs again, wondering if what we just saw was an image from the past, before the room was sealed. I started to think there might really be someone’s body up there, perhaps of the man we saw, but before I could suggest going back up there again to take a look, I woke up.

Strangely, I wasn't really scared when I woke up; I was more curious. I kept wondering what it all meant. Who was the man we found? Why was his room sealed up? The flimsy wall suggested it wasn't a contractor that put that wall up; it had the feel of something slapped together by the homeowner to hide... what? I wished the dream could have continued so Mike and I could've investigated the situation further.

Suddenly, I sat bolt upright in my bed, then ran out here, fired up the computer, launched AppleWorks and immediately pounded this dream into the keys while the memory was still fresh. That's one nice thing about Lisa not being here; in situations like this, I sometimes have to kick her off the computer quickly to get memories of a dream down before I lose them (I can't hand write them; my handwriting is often illegible even to me *BLUSH*).

Anyway, I'd really like to get some comments from people on this. What do you think it means? It was quite vivid; I figure it must mean something; dreams often do.