I was talking to one of my old coworkers from the school in Seattle, and she had been renting a room in a house that was really a school also. She had a bedroom off the hallway, and then the rest of the main level of the house was taken up by school uses. She told me that the whole house was for sale, and she was moving to the midwest somewhere. I was curious about it and went downstairs to a weird cellar area with Kevin and a banker, and we found out that the house was actually selling really cheap, and it turned out that we had enough money in our checking account to buy it right then. We were super excited, and Kevin ran up to look in the window by the door for a visa sticker, so we would know if we should write a check or use the debit card.
After we had completed the transaction, I sat upstairs and talked to my coworker again. She told me about her plans to move, and about her last vacation, and I told her about the girl who had stayed in the house and been her substitute at the school while she was gone. We reminisced about how strange it was that all these people we knew had already lived there, but that I was going to live in the house now. She got busy with something in the classroom area and I peeked into her room to see what it was like.
Standing in the hallway, I noticed that there were stairs leading up to a top story. I remembered seeing an upstairs window from the street, but I had never been up there for work. So I started up the stairs and when I got to the top, I was amazed. A long, wide hallway of dark wood stretched ahead of me, and natural light flooded in from several rooms off the hall. I walked along, looking into each one, and found beautifully papered bedrooms and offices, some with people in them gathering up their things to leave. The house was sold as is, so I knew all of the furniture would be staying in the rooms. I felt like hyperventilating as I realized that I had already bought the house and all this space came with it. It seemed so strange that such a large, well appointed level stood above the really quite average, slightly grimy ground floor. Finally I came into a room at the end of the hall, and I knew it would be my bedroom. It had green brocade on the walls and a bed in the middle of the room had been crafted to look like a giant birds nest.
I came out the room, and an older woman who appeared to be some kind of district administrator asked me some questions. I thought about using the extra bedrooms upstairs as special studios for the school. The woman explained to me that the tower on the edge of the house was condemned and very unsafe. We stood at a window that looked over the roof toward the tower; it was accessible only by a frail South American-looking suspension bridge. I assured her we would be very careful, and climbed out the window to cross the roof toward the bridge. Kevin and a few other friends climbed out behind me.
As we approached the bridge and discussed the best way to salvage the tower, I woke up.
