I’ve been having a recurring dream every night for the past two weeks. It’s been more or less the same series of events, with only slight alterations.

It begins with me having to enter a large building. This building is either an office, a school, a store, an arcade, or sometimes more than one of those. My goal is to find someone; an old friend that I haven’t seen in years. She’s holed up in a room somewhere, and to get there I need to navigate a series of stairwells, elevators, and/or long hallways. These places are always crowded, with people striking up conversations with me. Not wanting to be rude, I talk to them all for a time. The idea of asking for directions never crosses my mind at any time.

It changes every night, but I run into a woman during my investigation. She’ll either be my partner at my old job (an air-headed blonde covered in regrettable tattoos), or an early-twenties stoner from outside the US who only ever talks about music (a slightly overweight redhead who only wears black tanktops). She’ll help me out in my journey, or so I think; after several minutes, we’ll be back where we began, and she’ll beg me to introduce her to my mother.

Eventually, I leave them all behind, and spend the rest of my time going through the long halls, taking the elevators, climbing the stairs, until I finally reach my destination. But there’s always an obstruction when I get there: a locked door, a sudden rush of people, an invisible force pulling me away, or just the woman I’m looking for not looking at or responding to me when I call her name.

And that’s where everything ends.