I don't dream often. No, that's not true - I'm sure I dream every night, but I seldom remember what I dreamt, and even when I do it is usually so mundane that it isn't worth remembering. Every once in a while though, I have a dream that for some reason sticks. Sometimes I recall it hazily but it slips away before I am fully awake, but sometimes all it takes is a mental association later in the day, and it springs to mind fully intact.

It was a few days ago; must have been Friday night, I had a dream about a fairly tall building. The portion above ground was maybe 60 or 70 stories. I don't think it was a completely typical building structure either - the sides maybe not quite true, though I was too close to the base to see the overall form. It could have looked from a distance a bit like the Transamerica building. I remember knowing in my dream that it extended deep undrerground as well - perhaps even as deep as it was tall.

I was walking around inside - some of the lower portion was a shopping mall. You could get from one floor to the next via an elevator or stairs. I took the elavator to the lowest basement level for which there was a button: 60-something. The elevator became misaligned with the stops during the long ride down and slowed to a stop a little more than halfway past the designated floor. Instead of moving upward to level with the floor, I watched the crack of light between the closed doors as the elevator continued downward to align with the level below. The doors slid open and there was a floor I'd never seen before. Stepping out, I looked around:

It was rather stark; waxed tile floors, long hallways with white painted concrete walls, lit coldly by flourescent ligths in the drop ceiling. Men in business suits and expensive shoes flowed purposefully down the halls, though none seemd to notice or care of my intrusion.

I turned to look back and noticed that the elevator I had arrived in had departed, but there was a call button and an array of maybe four elevator doors total beside it. I pressed the button. A few moments, a glowing indicator lamp and a chime later, one of the doors opened to an empty elevator much like the one in which I had arrived, though it travelled a different shaft. Inside, I examined the button panel, and though it had controls for all the floors above like previous elevator, it also had several lower floors labelled. Curious, I pressed the lowest of them, labelled "B87".

Through parting doors appeared a floor more or less identical to the one above, but a little dimmer, and with fewer shuffling, silk-clad minions to detract from the gloomy austerity of the place. It may be a lower floor, but it didn't seem as much more hostile or forboding as I would expect to find at the bottom of a mysterious elevator, in a secret sub-basement of a massive building. Was this really the bottom, or just another false front? I wondered. I rode the elevator up and down a few times but it didn't seem to have the same misaligmnet problem as the previous one, and I couldn't get it to go any lower. Or maybe there really weren't any more floors.

Then I noticed, just outside the doors and to the right was the entrance to the stairwell, door not locked, not even closed, and stairs leading downward beyond. I walked over, and down the stairs to the 89th level.

...

And I don't remember any more after that.

...

I went to see Eagle Eye the next day and had a weird deja vu feeling when they were talking about a secret sub-basement at the Pentagon. And then visiting Old Navy later, seeing the restricted (and kind of mysterious-looking) employees-only basement level was also weird, though I'd noticed it before, and maybe that was part of the inspiration for the dream.

I have no idea why I remember that dream in so much detail - it wasn't terribly dramatic or anything, but I did remember it, which is unique enough on its own, so I figured I'd write it down.