From my Substack diary for Friday, 19th. June 2026

I am hopelessly lost and, with every passing minute, becoming increasingly anxious that I will never find my room again; my home inside a shape-shifting hotel. The more corridors I walk down, the more doors I open, the more distant my home seems to be, as if somehow its very existence has been snuffed out. I try to blank out the thought that it may have blinked out of reality; trying to get home is the only thing that is keeping me going; keeping me moving; keeping me alive?

Leaving home is easy. Everything is normal and everything is as it should be. Walls are at right angles to each other and furniture is where it is meant to be. The only slightly strange thing is the absence of windows, but in the moment I am not thinking this is strange. It just is; a feature of my room, like the bed and the lamp.

I venture out down a corridor. All hotels have corridors, so nothing strange there. Downstairs. Everything seems pretty much as it should be. The lobby. For a while I am lulled into a sense of indifference. This is dull, so why am I even thinking about it? It is the outside I want to get to. But I never make it. I never ever get out of my hotel. If it even is a hotel. I think of something; have I left something in my room; something I might need on the outside? I feel compelled to make my way back. Whatever is drawing me is more powerful than the desire to be out in fresh air, light, sunshine and open skies.

Now my troubles really begin. I’ve been here before, not this exact place but this exact feeling. Impending dread; claustrophobia and hopelessness hit me even before I would normally experience those things, like a premonition of shocking inevitability. I somehow know what is going to happen; not in detail but in sheer brute fear. Sure enough, I venture down a corridor. This should be the one that takes me back to my room but it isn’t. It has changed. For one thing, it is a strange and not unpleasant mottled azure colour, as if I am walking down an underwater cave with very straight sides, perhaps in a Pixar animation. This isn’t right, but I am not frightened – yet.

After a series of dead ends and strange rooms, each stranger than the previous, I begin to feel fear. I swear the corridors are becoming narrower and the rooms smaller and, whilst easy to get into, are increasingly difficult to get out of. It is as if I am being squeezed into an ever smaller space. And it is relentless. There is no respite. There is a natural progression towards death, and a rather unpleasant death at that. I am thinking this but I am also persevering; that’s a good sign – I remain hopeful, despite the worsening situation I find myself in, a situation that, should it continue along its present course – and there is no reason to suspect that it won’t – will lead inevitably to my demise. But I am just as determined to get back to my room as the hotel is to prevent me.

Each route is different and the route down or up or into a room is usually different to the egress from that room. Something has clearly changed whilst I have been in that room. Most of the spaces I would not ordinarily venture into as they are fearful or narrow or steep and winding. One room had a sort of slide in place of stairs and was accessed through s hole in the floor; my feet could only just get a grip on the suede-like surface that prevented me from falling. I was in a fairly large cube of a room with odd assorted people of all sizes and shapes, each isolated from and not interacting with the others. A seemingly innocuous woman seemed to move towards me at an alarming rate, or rather I towards her, as if I was on a camera dolly with an invisible focus-puller making it appear that I was moving faster than I actually was. It’s unnerving and straight out of a horror movie.

The woman’s face is appealing until I zoom in impossibly close. Her face is a beautiful matt black but with impossibly round eyes and exaggerated deep-black eye-lashes. but when I become a magnifying glass it reminds me of an exotic egg shell that, whilst mostly black, is speckled with subtle muted colours; dark purples and dark reds. Everything is egg-shell matt. The instant I was propelled toward her I so desperately wanted to get away. This cube was not on the route to my home, and the only exit was the strange entrance I had made my way through. I managed to find my way back to that entrance, such as it was, but it has changed. Of course it has. I managed to get half way up towards the hatch but the tube narrows around me and I begin to feel dread as I can see either I am too big or the hole is too small. I have no idea if I will make it out before the life is literally squeezed out of me.

And then I woke up. I think I have been in this seedy hotel before. I have also been in a neon-lit Bladerunner-like dark, damp and cavernous city underground and giant endless department stores. All with lots of corridors, lots of doors and lots of ever-narrowing spaces, always in a desperate attempt to reach home. The dreams are harrowing and uncomfortable, and I feel sure they are trying to tell me something, or perhaps to reveal something about myself. But I am not sure what it is.