there's an apartment or bedroom in a larger apartment, on the ground floor. it's oriented like my room when I was a wee little kid, with a short, high, long window across from the door and over a small bed. but it's bigger than my kid's-bedroom, it deviates in that the wall to the right from the door has no inner corners, but opens into two hallways where people sleep.

in my dream I thought of the layout like this:

however there were beds and people slept there so now I realize it was (really, in my dream) like this:

so I slept in one of these nooks with some guy and then Jeff (dream person vaguely generated off of this guy Jeff Carlisle I knew in college, but much cuter) was with some girl.

then we realized that we were sleeping with the wrong people. uhhh we needed to determine who was supposed to be where? this was done by this weird magnetic confetti. picture those little fridge magnets with the words that people like to make poetry from. now, instead of words, make them little yellow dots with thin black circles, red squares, blue triangles. now picture sorting through all that. somehow this determined who was going in which nook.

and I was mad at Jeff of course for getting together with this other person.

at this point, the puppy woke me up becuase she wanted to nestle down near my head on
the bed. but I went right back to sleep again and fell back into pretty much the same dream. almost....

so now I was in New York city, but with the same players, and I am mad at Jeff.

I decided to go looking for him at his apartment. I walk there, along crowded streets, grey skies. I'm looking both for him and one of his housemates. apartmentmates. whatever.

I go into this apartment building and the walls, doors in the hallway are that dingy green that really was dingy but even when new and fresh back in the early 80s, looked dingy. I went right down a hall and saw Jeff entering a doorway and shutting it at the end of the hall. all the doors were unmarked, but I realized the apartment number was in raised sans-serif lettering in the tarnished brass doorjamb to the hallway floor. I bet they did that to make it easier to paint. anyhow the number was 226A. with the A in small caps, like A was the doorway and 226 was the apartment.

there was a hallway to the right. behind that, back the way I came, was another door. it was also 226, with a B. these apartments were suitelike and were interconnected. I knocked on that door and stuck my head in. this guy Judah, or Jesse, was there with some chick Sarah. they were sprawled out on the bed talking and hanging out. Judah resembled how I would imagine Erik Hamilton to look like if his curly blond hair was about 7 inches long. I knew him. however he would not let me go through his room to swing through the back of the apartment suite to go talk to Jeff. he was busy (I guess they were going to have sex).

I went back to the original door, and somehow got in. Jeff and another housemate were there. these two were trying to put together their own movie production company. they had like one project and dreams, that was it. I was mad about something to do with that. we got in an argument and I left.

I was off to some studio or set or something like this. I had to deal with these stepladders. there were three of them. they reached up to a thing that stuck out the side of a stone wall. the longest ladder was Jeff's, it was about 10 feet tall. then there was a 7 foot tall ladder, then a 4 foot tall one. they were all folding ladders, so the 4-foot one resembled a stepstool more than a ladder. but. they all reached up to the thing. the shorter ladders simply didn't go all the way to the ground.

Jeff's ladder was broken, the top steps were broken in half and sometimes bent.

I climbed the 7 foot one. looking at the top of the ladders, I saw that the part that was the top "step" or cap was not attached properly. I needed to fix that, but wasn't about to on Jeff's ladder, because why should I? now, the ladders weren't reaching up to a stone wall but more like a backstage part of a set. there were all kinds of dark grey warehouse metal shelving and the thing the ladders reached up to steck out from the top shelf. on the shelf that was next to me were the bolts that would attach the caps to the ladders. I grabbed a couple and started trying to line up the holes on the small ladder. it was hard. I got the impression this ladder came from the bathroom in the guys' apartment. some suspicion made me descend and look up. euw! the 4-foot ladder, where a lot of the steps were bolted to the supports, had gross green fuzzy algae growing like it had been left in a moist environment unclean for a while.

I finished with the shorter ladder and started onthe 7-foot one. looking on the shelf, there were no more metal bolts to use to attach the cap. the bolts that were there were a blue plastic. many of them were inadequate. some were missing heads, some were chewed up (like you would expect using platic bolts to fasten aluminum), some were stripped. I kept trying though, picking through what was there.

on other side of the metal shelves were long low work tables. a little kids' class started gathering there, with a teacher and many adult chaperones. I found myself sucked into the class. I sat there, trying to pay attention, and all the while still trying to put the ladder top together by feel without disrupting everyone. the class reached some pause or break point, and some of the adults left. I wanted to go as well; I didn't belong. but that meant leaving the broken ladder behind, and I wasn't done fixing it.

somewhere in the second half of the class, I finished fixing the ladder. but I woke up before anything else happened.