Running late

There was something to do with elevators.

I think I was traveling with a group, and took a different elevator from the rest of them. We were very close to, or in, the airport, but I was lost pretty much as soon as I got off the elevator. There was a sign that directed to another elevator, and then down a hallway that seemed vaguely familiar, and then the signs stopped. The people who had been in the elevator with me were a friendly lot and we tried to figure it out together, but with no luck.

Finally I asked directions of a fellow who said I should get to the first floor, at which point I'd have to exit the building and do a sort of U-turn in order to reenter in the right place. For some reason, this seemed perfectly correct to me; in fact, I could picture having had to do the same thing once before. "Ha ha! That's Sea-Tac Airport for you!" I said.

However, once I finally got to the ground floor, exited, and reentered, I saw that although there were counters for checking in, there was a large sign that said "NO STUDENTS." The students, apparently, had to check in elsewhere. Increasingly frantic, I found myself downstairs, trying to get to the correct place to check in for my flight. Although I thought I had budgeted plenty of time, all this wandering was costing me. It didn't help that one of the people I asked for directions (apparently I had wandered into a hospital or research wing; I wondered despairingly whether I was even still in the airport complex) said she always arrived four hours early for her flight. I only had 37 minutes left before take-off, and I hadn't even checked in.

I woke up with my heart pounding. "Like a drum" sounds clicheed, but that's what it sounded like to me as I lay there, relieved, in the dark.

Iced

Last night I dreamed I was driving somewhere in the Pacific Northwest (Seattle?), in a golden-beige convertible filled with crushed ice. It was definitely the thing to do, as we saw several pick-ups on the freeway doing the same thing. About six of us were sitting on the ice, although I noticed that I didn't feel particularly cold. There were some drinks stuck in the ice, but the driver was only having iced tea. He could have been tipsy, however, for all the driving he was doing; it was my responsibility, from the back of the car, where I was sitting perpendicular to the direction of travel, to do the steering. By rotating an empty glass in my outstretched hand (when I remembered to), I kept us within the traffic lines.

Later on, I spoke a little Italian.