No honour among thieves

Sometimes in my dreams, I come face to face with the extreme moral ambiguity of my beliefs and actions. Breaking into my ex's apartment and poking around is one example (see below); here is another.

I dreamed I was part of a deep-sea exploration team, searching inside sinkholes and underwater caves for something very valuable that has been lost, and which we are going to steal. We stop our submarine over the sometimes tiny rocky openings of sinkholes and send down our remote camera to see what's there. At one hole, I am watching the monitors as the camera pans around, and I catch a glimpse of something that looks like a person.

My first thought is that someone got stuck in the sinkhole and drowned. I send the camera in for a closer look, and see that the shape is a person, a woman wearing a gold one-piece suit, and she is still alive. She's standing on a thin ledge and looks exhausted and scared. I bring the remote camera in close to her, and although she doesn't seem to be able to see, she reaches out and grabs it and I carefully use it to pull her out of the hole. Once we have her on board our little submarine, we send the camera back down to finish the search.

The woman from the hole is shaking and crying, and tells us she had been trapped in the hole for weeks and has eaten nothing all that time. She is barely sane, and doesn't yet dare to hope that she is no longer buried at the bottom of the ocean.

Meanwhile, our camera finds something else in the hole: a bunch of black nylon bags lashed together. It is our quarry! We excitedly hook it and bring it to the sub, but soon we realise our sub is too small to carry both the bags and the rescued woman at once. Being profit-minded thieves, we decide that our only choice is to put the woman back in the hole, make off with the quarry, and send someone back to collect the woman later. Of course she fights and screams and pleads and cries, but we force her out of the sub and lower her back into the dark hole. I watched her go down into the darkness; the last thing I see is her terrified face peering up at us.

The ultimate modern loft apartment

I dreamed that I was in a strange apartment building, about 100 storeys high. I am doing some discreet espionage, skulking around in the hallway outside the penthouse spying on my ex-lover who lives there. I peer through the spy-hole and, seeing him not home, I sneak in and search through the place.

Inside the door is a wide hallway with family photos on the wall, mostly shots of my ex and his daughter, who's about five. Shockingly, it turns out my ex is a Star Trek Ferengi! After I integrate that tidbit of information, I proceed to the living room, which has a big-screen TV, glass coffee table and a natty blue couch, as well as an astounding stereo system. It is enormous, has a million little knobs and doohickeys, edged with chrome wherever possible and shaped like a 1950's fin car. The apartment has a tiny balcony too, only a foot or so wide with a fence, and extremely windy (since we are on the 100th floor.) There is a comical Ferengi hibachi out there. Then I head to the kitchen, where the appliances are all chrome blue and match the stereo. I look in the fridge and eat some leftovers.

Next I find the stairs and go up. Upstairs there's a large bathroom with jaccuzzi, and the luxurious master bedroom, but there's also a mysterious dark doorway. I hear a noise and, fearing that the Ferengi is home, I nip through the mysterious door and find myself on another flight of stairs. The top floor is dark and rough compared to the luxury of the rest of the place. The decor is decades out of date and none of it matches, the upholstery is hideous and everything is dusty. I find a small dark bedroom with an unwelcoming little bed and a row of forlorn dolls, and I realise this is the room of an absent child, an occasional visitor. I am inside the bedroom when I hear the Ferengi moving around downstairs, and in a fit of guilty terror I consider climbing out the window and escaping down the side of the building, but the wind is gusting and the roof is slanted, so I have to admit that my only option is to try to sneak past my ex and get out by the front door. I creep back down and wait until the Ferengi is busy getting himself a drink, pause at the door and look back to see him settle himself on the couch with his back to me. Then I turn the bolt, open the door and slip out without looking back.