i could sure use your help, sigmund

I had an interesting dream last night. Someone, please, tell me what it means.

Here’s a little back-story first: We have known Paul and Ramona since January 2007 (at least). Their son Jonathan had been going to our church since spring 2006, so when the time came for us to run an Alpha course, Paul and Ramona graciously opened their home to host it. As we got to know them here in Madrid, we learned that they have a home in Buffalo. We have never been to their home in Buffalo, however, which makes the beginning of this dream all the more strange…

I was in, um, their, um, bathroom at their home in Buffalo. Don’t ask me how I knew it was that home—I just knew.

Anyway, this bathroom was a little, um, weird.

It was a rather large tiled bathroom. I’d guess, 5 meters by 7 meters (roughly 15 feet by 21 feet). Huge. The toilet was by the long wall, in the middle. But, in front of the toilet was this, uh, rather large hole. The “hole” was tiled and finished, however, as if it was meant to be there. The hole was about 1.5 meters square (5 feet?) and it was at least 2 meters deep (6 or 7 feet). And it was only about 35 cm (one foot) in front of the toilet, off center a bit in the floor, but so close to the toilet that it made getting to the toilet feel like shuffling along a ledge with a sheer cliff right in front of you. What’s more, the floor around the hole seemed to slope slightly towards the hole and there was, um, a large air vent in the bottom of the hole--so large that you could see into the room that was directly underneath the bathroom, clear as day. Now, imagine that the hole has all this stuff lined up all around the edge of it, all of it dusty: cleaners, mop buckets, furniture polish, peanut butter, a jar of wood screws, floor wax, a plunger, bottles of bleach, a hammer, a hair dryer, a box of rags, smelly mop heads, a circular saw, laundry detergent, a curling iron, some machine bolts, nuts, a rubbish bin, a pile of pizza boxes, some used wood scraps, an industrial strength vacuum, a squeegee, possibly a bag of dryer lint and used fabric softener sheets kept for a rainy day. And probably a pile of used facial tissues, too. Oh, and a bag of extra toilet paper, about 13 times the size of this bag:


Also, here’s a picture of the floor plan, so you can see it easier. Click on the image to see it in a larger format:


Okay, so, there I am, uh, sitting on the toilet. I look down the, uh, hole, because you can’t not look into the hole. And I notice the air vent at the bottom of it. I can see into the room downstairs clear as day and thank the good Lord no one’s down there, because, I figure, “I bet someone down there could see you up here just as well as you could see them.” I also notice that the hole is cleaner than anything else in the room. This is, by the way, very uncharacteristic of Paul and Ramona. Just to set the record straight: they make it into my list of the top 10 cleanest people I’ve ever met—and I do keep such a list, by the way.

Anyway, as I’m sitting there keeping an eye out for cheap-thrill-seekers below, I happen to accidentally knock some spray cleaner from the edge into the hole. But there is so much stuff surrounding the hole that all of it proceeds to cascade into the cavern like so many large, mutated dominoes. Then, the big bag of toilet paper goes in and immediately--from where I do not know—water starts pouring into the hole, filling it up. There is no hose there, no tap that I can see, but there is water pouring forth, as if from a spring or from the rock that Moses struck when he was in the desert.

I presume the water does not go through to the room below because probably the air vent is covered with plexiglass, which makes sense, of course, since plexiglass is known to increase air flow from one room to the next, uh huh. The first thing I think is: “Oh my goodness, this hole is going to fill up.” But then I think, “Oh well, I’ll be done long before that happens, so no worries.”

Then: “Oh no, the toilet paper in the hole is going to get wet!”
But then: “That’s okay, I have a roll here.”
And then, I’m struck with a pang of conscience: “But, guess I’d better dive in to retrieve their toilet paper. Lord knows, I wouldn’t like it if all my toilet paper supply got destroyed in a water-filled hole and I didn’t know about it till later.” (Notice, I still have not planned to tell them anything about the replenishing, uh, cistern in their bathroom.)

So, I dive in and retrieve the toilet paper. The water is freezing cold. And I can’t get out of the hole. And my trousers are still around my ankles.

The end.

So, tell me, please. What does this mean?

And, Paul and ‘mona: Please reassure me you do NOT have a bathroom like this at your home in Buffalo. And, if you do, please do something about that hole in your bathroom, or at least that air vent, because, seriously, it’s a portal for some kind of peep show. Oh, and, you may want to pick up some more TP next time you’re out.

And sorry ‘bout the mess. Hope it’s not too much a hassle to clean.