The Scary Issue!

Nothing, and I mean nothing, scares me more than drowning in an elevator. Some people are scared of being kidnapped, or murdered, or mugged in a dark alley. Other people are scared of rats and bats and heights. Not me. The thing that absolutely terrifies me, right to my bones, is drowning in an elevator.

My girlfriend looked at me like I was crazy last night, waking up in a cold, clammy sweat, telling her that I had just had a nightmare about drowning. In an elevator. I didn’t tell her that I have that dream two, sometimes three times a week now.

In this dream, there are always two other people in the elevator with me. One is an attractive woman, because, you know, who wouldn’t want to die with an attractive woman? The other is invariably a small child, ugly, loud, and slightly rotund. The child’s sex changes from dream to dream. I like to imagine, in analyzing this particular piece of the dream, that my subconscious is placating me, saying, “At least if you have to drown in an elevator, that annoying little kid is going to go first.”

Thanks, subconscious.

I’m talking to the woman, in my dream, and things are going really well. I’m starting to think to myself that maybe I might get somewhere, especially if the little kid shuts the hell up. It’s right about then that I notice my socks are a little wet.

The elevator is pretty rapidly filling with water, and the little kid is really crying now. Kid’s got a set of lungs, for sure. Unfortunately, they’re starting to fill with water. My pants start sticking to my legs as the water creeps up. It’s colder than I would have thought. Me and the attractive woman, we start to swim to the top of the elevator, trying to keep our heads above water, but it becomes quickly apparent to the both of us that there’s nowhere left to go.

That escape hatch they always have in movies? Those exist, but ever since reading an article about how they’re almost always bolted from the outside, my dreams have, much to my regret, faithfully represented that fact.

Junior doesn’t seem to be faring quite as well as us, as it appears that he/she can’t swim. The attractive women and I always make an effort to keep the kid afloat, but just when the volume of air at the top of the elevator gets too small for our mouths, we can’t keep up the appearance of being nice, and it’s every man for himself.

At this point, I usually bolt straight up in bed, sweating so much that, for a second, my brain is able to seriously consider the fact that I may really have been drowning. After a few minutes, I can settle down and go back to sleep.

Am I crazy enough that I think that this is a premonition, instead of just a messed up recurring dream? Probably not, but I don’t know, and I don’t really care to know. All I know is that my girlfriend thinks I’m absolutely bug nutty whenever we go into a tall building now.

If an elevator opens with an attractive women and a fat little child inside, I’ll try to make my response as quick and polite as possible:

Going down? Thanks, but I think I’ll take the stairs.

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