Moral of the story: Take the bloody stairs!

My dreams tend toward the seriously batshit bizarre, especially when I'm doing a show. Atypically, I've remembered very few dreams of any kind in recent months. However, there was one I woke up from about 1:30 this morning with quite clear recall, and no small amusement.

I'm traveling to some sort of meeting -- the impression I retain is that it was in downtown Chicago, and theatre-related -- using an extended arrangement of escalators heading up and down and all around, either inside one large building or connecting several, I'm not sure which. But it goes a long way. I do have a crystalline-vivid image of an almost Escher-like descent through a red brick archway up ahead, when the whole shebang becomes a traffic jam with people jammed solidly the width of the escalator, as far as the eye can see. The crowd pattern behaves exactly like creeeeeeeping gridlocked traffic, although the locomotion is still coming from the escalator.

Eventually, just as I throw my hands up and climb over the wide-but-far-from-impassable half-wall separating the escalator from the stairs that have been next to it the entire time, word makes it back that the backup is because some guy set his boss on fire way up ahead. I continue into the building on the stairs, my path unobstructed, only slightly annoyed with myself for waiting so long.

I can't imagine where anything like that might have come from. :-)