I’m hoping that by typing out this recurring nightmare, which I had again last night, I won’t have it again, because it is ... how you say ... scary and stressful.

Here it is:

I want to take a shower, and I have a bath towel wrapped around me. I find myself at the entrance to a large public women’s restroom with rows and rows of stalls. It’s faintly lit and my eyes struggle to adjust to the darkness. The distance from the stalls to the sink is improbably wide and the length of the stall rows is almost unending.

The place is undeniably filthy, and even through the faint bluish light, I notice the damp floors and dripping pipes and faucets. There’s toilet paper strewn across the floors, sticking in puddles in some places and collecting what I hope is dirt and mud. I’m afraid that I might step in something, and my bare feet squish on bits of detritus as I begin my timid search for the showers.  

As I get deeper into this place, my pulse quickens as I realize the first room opens into another room and then another and another. It’s a labyrinth, but each room is different from the next. Some rooms are square and the stall doors are missing or hanging off their hinges. Some have showers, but the curtains are closed and I’m afraid to open them for fear of what or who I will find inside. While I travel into the maze, I can hear voices and the slap of bare feet on the floors, but the moving shadows are unidentifiable. I'm afraid to know I'm not alone, but I decide it would be worse to hear silence and to be left to wonder.

I come to a room that is absolutely pitch black; I cannot see my hand in front of my face. I open my eyes wide in the total and utter blackness while I strain to see, and still I’m greeted with nothingness. In the same instant, I hear a woman screaming in terror while I realize the room is flooded with water almost to my knees. I feel the panic wash over me in my desperate search for a way out, but I don’t scream. Someone else is doing it for me, and I feel akin to this person, knowing that someone else is terrified in this black, flooded room with me.

And then we emerge, breathless and tentative, back to the filthy dimness.

We’re together now, me and this lanky African-American woman; she too is clutching a bath towel around her with the towel’s ends in a fist at her chest. We acknowledge each other only peripherally, united in our effort of escape and taking comfort that we’re not alone. We’re trying to find our way out of this place, back through all the rooms.

And then I wake up.

Maybe this means it’s time to clean the apartment.