Dream

So last night I had a very interesting dream. It all started on 64th Road in Forest Hills, Queens, in front of the apartment house that my old friend Gina used to live in. However, instead of Gina's building being there, the Dakota, John Lennon's apartment building, which is actually on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, was. 

Anyway, I was standing in front of this building with a young man, a guy maybe in his late teens/early 20s. He said that he lived in the building and asked me if I wanted to go inside with him. I said to him,  "Are you kidding me? Of course I do. I've forever wanted to check out the Dakota." He rang the bell and his mom came down to the main entrance. When she did, I gave her my elbow because that's the kind of way people greet each other nowadays. 

When I got into the apartment building, I got my first shock. In the dream, I had always thought that if you entered the main entrance of the Dakota, you would see a grand foyer or something like that. But it wasn't a foyer that was on the other side of the main entrance. Instead, it was this kid's apartment. I remember saying to the kid and his mom, "Holy shit. I thought all these years that if I entered the front door of the Dakota, I would see an amazing foyer, but it's actually just your guys' apartment." 

Then there was the apartment itself. It was big, but it looked super old. The high ceilings had ornate cornices, but the molding hadn't been restored in years. The furniture was old and had no rhyme or reason to it. The cushion colors that I saw were pea green and mustard yellow. 

I walked deeper into the apartment, and I saw that the place was absolutely huge. One part of the apartment faced 64th Road, but there was a massive corridor that was parallel to Yellowstone Boulevard.  As I was walking down this corridor, which had tombstone-shaped doors on either side, the young man's siblings appeared. He apparently had a lot of brothers and they were a little bit obnoxious. 

At some point, a familiar motif from prior dreams of mine again reared its head: the gum. In many dreams I've had recently, I've had a mouth full of pink chewing gum—chewing gum that impedes me from speaking. During last night's dream, the gum impeded me from speaking to this guy's mom. There were also girls, girls in their 20s, in the apartment, and I was barely able to speak to them, again because of the gum. However, this time, I decided to do something about the sticky stuff. I walked over to a fountain that was outside the apartment and began digging in my mouth for the gum, trying to get it out. I was mostly successful, but I got a lot of strange looks from people who saw me digging in my mouth. 

Back in the apartment, I continued to hang out with the young man. Apparently, he and his family also had a lot of pets. They had something like seven cats and three dogs and maybe even a few wilder animals, too. I remember seeing a burrow in one of the rooms, like a rabbit burrow or a fox's den, next to a sofa. I remember wondering how an animal could dig a hole in an apartment, but nevertheless, there it was.