Dream Log: Suspicion of Mayhem on Wall Street

Last night I dreamed that my brother and I went to work for a financial institution on Wall Street. "On Wall Street" is usually just a euphemism geographically, but our offices were located in a new skyscraper which was actually fairly close to Wall Street in the southern tip of Manhattan. As are many fictional buildings I dream about, this skyscraper was unrealistically large, a half-mile high or so. While it is the case in real life that very many very tall buildings have gone up in New York City in the past 20 years, this one was even taller than life.

It was September 2019 in my dream, the building had been opened for business in 2018, I was my actual age, 58, but my brother was in his early 20's, as were most of our new co-workers. In real life my brother is 56. I was worried, going in on our first day on our new jobs, that I might be somewhat ostracized because of my age, but everyone was perfectly pleasant to me.

However, almost right away my brother and I both became concerned that some of the other people in the skyscraper, perhaps in our firm, perhaps in other firms, might be mass murderers.

Our firm occupied several stories in the building between floor 55 and 60. I went up and down the stairs a lot, and the floor number was on a small brass plaque on every floor. The stairwells weren't shut off from the main areas of activity as in many tall buildings, and the stairs were attractively carpeted. There were plenty of elevators; still, it seemed the architects wanted to encourage people to take the stairs if they could.

Besides my age, I had also been worried that my complete lack of qualifications as a Wall Street stock broker might cause friction with my co-workers, but it soon became clear that they valued me for things which had nothing to do with finance.

Back to the suspicions of mass murder: my brother and I were never sure whether or not such violence was actually going on in the skyscraper, or who might have been involved in it and who was an innocent potential victim. The signs we saw constantly contradicted each other. For example: at one point I was in a room which contained two hospital-style cots, when two men wearing what looked like Haz-Mat suits came in, carrying medical-looking containers. At once I thought that there might be a severed head in each of those boxes; and sure enough, soon the men opened the boxes and I saw a head in each one.

But then I remembered that, besides financial firms, there was a company in the building which specialized in making objects for horror movies. Such as realistic-looking severed heads made of rubber and plastic.

Back and forth, back and forth my brother and I went: horror and fear of violence, and then a perfectly reasonable, non-violent explanation for what had been frightening us. Back and forth.

For the whole dream, my brother and I never left the enormous building, although we did roam all over it. Some of the floors had enormously high ceilings. There were some absolutely huge rooms in the building which were practically empty. In one of these rooms the walls were covered with some sort of glittering gold-colored fabric. It seemed as if their primary purpose of these huge rooms was to flaunt how extravagantly expensive this piece of real estate was.

At the very top of the building, floor 134, walkways surrounded a tremendous atrium. I was on this floor, looking down into this atrium, when a group of employees from a Chinese firm spilled out of the elevators, celebrating some holiday. One of them threw an inflated clear transparent rubber ball back and forth with me, until one of us accidentally threw it into the atrium. Then we stood side by side, smiling, and watched the ball fall down and down and down.

At one point, seized by a sudden terror of the possibly-existent murderers, I began to run. I was going to run out of the building and run far away. But before I had gone ten yards, my brother stopped me, physically tackled me in mid-stride, and, whispering, pointed out to me that if there were mass murderers among us, they might be watching us, and might attack if they saw that we were fleeing. The safest thing to do, he said, was to act as if everything was okay.

As time went by, my brother and I became less worried about the possible mass murder, and more convinced that we had just been misunderstanding things. Everyone was being really nice to me. Moreover, no-one seemed to expect me to actually do any work, which was a good thing, because I had no idea how to buy or sell securities on behalf of a client. Or perhaps they saw my primary role in the company as socializing with the young people and raising team spirits. Which I was more than happy to do. And then I woke up.