The Hotel Dream

Several memorable aspects emerged from this dream. My wife and I, younger folks, had bought an older place. Having moved in, we discovered it was a hotel and we had several guests. I knew them; all were male salesmen, white, with short black hair, wearing suits, with very broad shoulders. They looked like ex-offensive line men and I knew one had been. Right after I realized they were in the rooms, they began checking out. Turned out there were three.

The first salesman checking out forced me to realize that I didn’t know what was happening. Scrambling to catch up, I went through the small hotel. Dinghy wallpaper was hung, which I declared needed to be replaced. At least three stories were found. The rooms were small and the halls were tall and narrow. Several cats were present. I began taking care of them while inventorying the hotel. It was dilapidated, with a strange, brownish carpet which was bare in many spots. The salesman was ready to go and needed to pay and get a receipt. I found a system hidden behind pieces of paper taped to the top of them. The paper were notes to staff about how to use the system according to the header on one, but all were blank.

I wrote out a receipt longhand for the guest, thinking through all the line items a receipt like that should have. He was comfortable with that and prompted me, “You also need the date.” I then signed it. Holding up a fat tome, he mentioned he had a paperback book that was in the room and wanted to take it with him. I told him, “No charge,” because we had bought it used at a Goodwill for a quarter.

My wife, who’d been wandering around the place rushed over, urging me to charge him, complaining, “That’s why we’re losing money.”

I told her that I didn’t think a quarter would break us. We argued about little things adding up. I noticed that the carpet’s edges were green.

Meanwhile, I was thinking, I need to organize a checkout system. I removed the papers from atop the system and found a small gray system. Looking very old, it was turned off and didn’t seem to be attached to anything. I decided not to use it but just do everything by hand myself. The second man showed up to checkout. This went better, but he had to tell me when he arrived because I had no idea.

I realized by this point that the odd carpet was withered grass. Finding a spray bottle of water, I began walking around, spraying the grass to encourage it to grow back. As I did, I discovered petunias and tulips springing up in full bloom and called out to my wife, “Hey, look, we have flowers in our yard.” I was thinking as I did this it would be lovely to have a lush green lawn as my carpet. This lawn was full of weeds. That didn’t worry me; I would pull the weeds. Since they were inside, the weeds shouldn’t return as long as I kept pulling them when they appeared and watered the grass. Many parts of it were already green and restored. I would let the flowers stay.

At this point, the third man arrived to check out. Since I was working on the carpet-lawn, I told her to check him out and explained what to do, which she did.

After that, a very slick-appearing man in a uniform appeared. He introduced himself as ‘the major’ and showed me so beautiful shiny blue things which he’d acquired from foreign countries. He wanted to display them for sale in my hotel. My wife was instantly against that, telling me, “Don’t give him any money.” I informed the man that I wasn’t paying anything or giving money or security in any form, no security deposits, nothing, and that we would not be liable for his objects. He seemed to be agreeing with that. Then he sat down and put his legs up. His feet were replaced by prosthetics. I asked him if that happened in the war, and he said, “Yes.”

Dream end.