Dream: The Hidden Restaurants

Dream 20040615, 6:50 AM:
This dream has much the same feel as a previous dream; it’s not a repeat or a continuation, but it reminds me very strongly of this other one (note: the dream at the link has some sexual parts, so don’t click there if you don’t want to read about that.)

This dream is repetitive, with minor changes – that’s something that happens very rarely in my dreamlife, so I wanted to mark that.

First, Chris and I are going to a restaurant. It’s down below the street level, and it’s hidden – we have to have an access code to get in through a special door, and then go down into the restaurant, I think by way of stairs. We get to it, and a waiter shows us to a table. The tables are all fairly elegant, with very plush chairs, and at the tables are mostly youngish couples, primarily just one man and one woman at each table, but some of the tables have larger groups. Everyone is sitting and chatting. The people are sort of stylized and slightly blurred, as if they were sketched in very bright colors with soft pastels. We sit down, and then another waiter comes and takes us to a different room in the back. This room is circular, and has a bank of benches all around the outside edge. The walls are curtained floor to ceiling with a burgundy organza-like fabric, and there is a person here adjusting the curtains. People are sitting around the edges of the room, and there’s some kind of show that’s supposed to start soon. I remark to Chris that it looks like we’ve been demoted to a less fancy part of the restaurant; the people here seem kind of blah and ordinary, not nearly as brightly colored or interesting as the folks in the first room where we wanted to sit. We decide to leave rather than staying for the show. We go out into a parking lot, and there is a man there, not parking cars, but he seems like he’s in charge of escorting guests to their cars or something. He is dressed entirely in white, with white paint on his face, and his suit has a white hood that covers his head snugly; if he had ears and whiskers, he would look like someone in a White Rabbit costume. His suit reminds me of those footie pajamas for babies. *I wake up, briefly, and go back to sleep.*

I decide that the trip to the hidden restaurant was a bit of a let-down, and so I find another one, and Chris and I go to it. This time, when we get to the hidden secret door, I make a comment that it reminds me of Marfreless – a “hidden” bar in Houston, with no sign on the door. We walk into an elevator, and I have to punch certain buttons in sequence as it moves; the elevator lurches sideways as well as going down, and I know that by pushing the numbers we’ve gotten to a different destination than the elevator would have otherwise reached. I don’t remember as much of what happens in this restaurant, and whether we ended up eating dinner. I do remember that there was another man in the weird white suit as we left, although he was definitely a different person.

Then, a third similar dream sequence, although there’s not a restaurant. We have to go through a weird series of chutes to get into this building; I remember being on a roof, and going through a hatch, and then sliding down what looks like an air conditioning duct, rectangular and sticky with wet light blue paint. The duct dumps us out on something like an assembly line, but it’s not turned on, so it’s not dangerous. It looks like a large-scale laundry. I don’t remember what we do inside the building. I do remember that we see someone from Junior Players there, and that somehow we get a statement that will allow us to get paid back for the cleaning bills to get the blue paint off of our suits, as both Chris and I are wearing nice suits with jackets.