I had the scariest nightmare ever about Albany.

I took a bus and the walked out to a car dealership in New Jersey, out past some long abandoned factories. Big long abandoned industrial buildings and earthy and smelly, rundown farm land. It’s still winter, quite bleak and gray. I’m looking at these big pickup trucks and then it’s time to go home. Somebody suggests I take state subsidized commuter rail back to New York – it’s only a few bucks as it’s subsidized. I ride a few more stops then expected until I get to this scenic crossing over a river – scenic except you know for lots of electrical lines. I get off at the station there, and there is a scenic viewing platform, but of course the real scenic view of the river is highly blocked off with restricted area signs and chain link fence due to the electrical infrastructure. Big signs put up by State of New Jersey discuss how green the commuter rail is, being powred by the hydro dam right below my feet.

Deciding to walk the rest of the way downtown, I step into this vast underground college campus, officially it’s an affiliate of Rutgers University as I’m still in New Jersey. Vast lecture halls, all underground. I pop into a lecture hall briefly and then head back out needing to get back to the Empire Plaza and downtown. So I follow this tunnel back to the Empire Plaza, running into this long time political activist from a lifetime ago – some left wing group I used to hang out with in my college days. We talk as we walk to the Empire Plaza, the mystery level I’m completely unfamiliar with. I arrive after going what seems like miles to what appears to be the Empire Plaza but an unfamiliar level. Looks like the Concourse but this is a different, lower level. There are some signage but it’s confusing. White walls, brass, concrete I beams.

What would you know by now I need to go to the bathroom. There is a sign to the bathroom, down the stairs to an even deeper more obscure level of Plaza. At first I walk through an abandoned cafeteria, tables roped off in caution tape and a hastely posted “Posted No Tresspassing” sign like you might find on a farm. Then I find another bathroom sign that directs me through another hallway, a set of stairs to another cafeteria, this one a knock off of Pizza Hut from the 1970s, full of state workers in pin stripe shirts eating what appears to be thin microwave pizza and round plates of colored flat jello, each quarter of the plate a different brightly colored jello, red, yellow, blue and green. I am at a loss, the next bathroom signs appear to point a broom closet.

I ask one of workers and he looks up from his plate of flat colored jello and he points me down another corridor. I walk past the Office of State Purchasing from Women Owned Alpaca Farms. Who knew the state had an agency that only purchased from women owned Alpaca Farms? I guess fiber for state agency uniforms? Down another hall, set of a stairs. I see a even more state offices, the hallway narrows further, as this part of the building is very old and not accessible to people with disabilities. Apparently this part of the building was never updated to accommodate persons with wheelchairs. Past more filing cabinets and cubicles. This is a very old and dated interior, so deep in the Plaza few people ever see it. And I keep following that signs promising me the bathroom, deeper, and deeper into lower and lower levels of the Empire Plaza I never knew existed.

At this point I wake up.