Sometimes I have these cinematic dreams, and I have decided that if I for some reason wake up right after it and still remember it vividly enough, I should write it down. So yesterday I had one of those. What follows is more of a polished description of how I understood the dream, almost a skeleton of a movie script.

It starts with a small boy around age ten in a black fancy suit running away from two men, a thin and a fat one (aka. Home Alone), it is a hotel corridor, he runs up to the elevators and press the call button, the button is round small polished chrome button in a round chrome inset (the button is reccurring), the boy gets in the elevator and it starts going down, the elevator has no doors nor a back wall, as it goes down the walls of the building goe back and it starts descending into a cave like structure (blue lighting, cold, sense of unrealism starts).

The boy is sad, the elevator stopps suddenly a meter from the bottom and would not react to buttons, the other elevator nearby starts working, the men are chasing him, the boy panics, jumps out of the elevator, looks around, finds two pairs of brass buttons, in each pair one is with white and other with red rim. He presses the red one in the pair next to the second elevator and hears it stop, he presses the white button on his own elevator, it starts rising up, he jumps and barely catches it, climbs in.

The elevator puts the boy out on the roof, but it is not just a roof, it almost feels like a mountain top with uneven surface, moss, sheer drop-off on all sides and even puddles that look almost like icelandic geiser puddles, the boy is angry with this, shouts his anger into the wind, when suddenly the men are there too. the boy looks where to run, but there is no other way to go. then he spots again the same shiny metal button right next to a curiously round puddle. he stands in the puddle and presses the button.

The floor of the puddle sinks, taking the boy with it, he holds his breath until he can no longer, he is under water, but he sees a female figure made of light call him forward, he swims to it and emerges to the surface.

He is in a fountain in front of a victorian style castle, the fountain pool is rectangular and clearly only 20-30 cm deep. the boy was scared under water, but now he a bit more calm and sure of himself. the men appear again, ok now I will run away from them, the boy runs away from the castle into the garden, the takes random turns in the green labyrinth, the men follow closely, the green slowly gives way for yellow (autumn) leaves, then vines and then brick walls replace the garden, now he is running inside a building, in front of him there is a stained glass window displaying the same white female figure with light shining through it (for some reason there are glass doors that he needs to open with the shining button here in the dream), the men chasing him almost catch up to him, he and the slender man crash trought the stained glass window together.

And fall into the same fountain pool in front of the castle. the boy and the slender man look at each other and laugh.
the exposition moment happens here - the slender man is the boys' father and the boy was running away from him and from reality because his mother died and he just could not accept it. It took going trought these troubles, these stages of grief live and smile again.

And then the end sciene - the boy and his father join hands and spin in circles around each other (to the tune of The Passenger by Iggy Pop) while the background changes back to the hotel where the shocked relatives from the funeral look on to them being so happy, then to a marriage ceremony where the father marries again, then to son growing up, then the son marries, and the music suddenly stops with the grown up son standing over two graves - the father has died too, but then a little boy comes over - his own son. he puts his hand on his sons shoulder and The Passenger music starts again.

The END.

So the idea is clearly of a boy going trough stages of grief while running away, the stages were for some reason illustrated with elements (metal, air, water, life, earth) and with seasons (winter, spring, summer, autumn) and not with classical stages of grief. I am not sure of the significance of the fat man. I doubt one can make a full movie out of this, but this could be a fun little short, possibly an animated one.

P.S. In the dream the Passenger song only sounded as the Lalalala part that starts at 1:15 here and as I could not quite remember what the song or the author was, so it took quite a titanic effort to find the right song with 'lalalala' lyrics.