The Elevator.

Generally, the elevator will make one trip on battery power to a nearby floor or in most cases the ground floor. The doors will open properly and the elevator will safely shut down until the backup generators kick on. So with that being said, you would expect the doors to open to a lobby full of your co-workers, but this time was different. 

Today was a normal Thursday for you. You wake up at the same time as you did yesterday, you stop and get the same coffee from the same cafe as you have a million times since starting this job and you park in the same parking spot in front of your building. Before walking in you notice that the sky is getting dark and wonder if it’s going to rain. Your windows are down but you’re about to be late and need to clock in so you leave them down. 

You go about your day as usual. You’re a personal assistant to some big shot CEO. He’s always making you run unnecessary errands for him and get him the most random things in the office. Last week it was a specifically pink sticky note when he had a stack of green ones in front of him. Today it’s going down to the bakery in the lobby for a piece of toast. On your way to the elevator, you look outside to see that it’s starting to rain. You quickly rush to the elevator so you can go roll your car windows up. As soon as the doors open and you walk inside you hear thunder. It’s starting to storm, you thought to yourself. The elevator doors close and you hear a loud crash, it’s lightning. It sounds way too close to your building. The power soon goes out. You're stuck, panicking. 

After a few minutes of total darkness and an alarm blaring, the elevator slowly moves down and the doors open. You look out to see nothing, still, pitch black. You believe you’re in the lobby as you only needed to go down one floor to reach the lobby. You step out confused because you don’t see anyone or hear anything except for the storm outside. You feel yourself falling and soon hit the ground. You stand up and start stumbling trying to find your way to the front doors to go outside. You grab your phone from your pocket and see that you have no cell reception. You use the flashlight on your phone and quickly realize you’re not in your building. You start panicking more and run to the front. 

As soon as you open the doors, you’re back in the elevator. The generator kicked on and the lights turned back on. The elevator opens and you walk into the lobby of your building. You see everyone and everything you normally do. Everything was going as it normally does as if there was no storm. You walk into the bakery and talk to the owner while she’s cleaning some tables. You ask her if she noticed the storm and she said there was never a storm and it’s been sunny since she got to work. Confused, you go ahead and order the toast for your boss and carry on as usual. On your lunch, you decided to go grab a sandwich from a sandwich shop down the road. As you approach your car you notice that your seats are wet, as if it had rained. But there’s no way that’s possible because nobody else noticed the storm. 

You try to carry on as usual but you can’t stop thinking about what happened a few hours earlier. You’re driving yourself crazy trying to piece it all together. You decide to walk back to your desk to try and collect your thoughts. You lay your head down and get woken up by your co-worker and she asks how long you’ve been asleep. So you look at the time and notice it’s time to clock out and go home for the day. You had been asleep for 3 hours. Why didn’t anyone wake me up, you thought to yourself. You’re hoping your boss isn’t upset with you for falling asleep but as you walk by his office you see that he’s already left. Hopefully, he didn’t notice. 

When you walk in your front door, your fiancé meets you at the door and asks you how your day was. As you’re explaining what happened in the elevator he stops you and tells you that something similar had happened to him today too. He was the only one that noticed a storm and the power outage. Everyone looked at him like he was crazy when he would try to talk to someone about it. You both sit there and try to figure out what happened and why you two are the only ones that experienced this today. After hours and hours of trying to figure it out, you come up with nothing. You both decide to try and sleep off the day. Whenever you hear your first alarm, you have to set about 20 because you’re a deep sleeper, you look at the date and it says that it’s Thursday again. Maybe your eyes are playing tricks on you, you try to think nothing of it but it’s in the back of your mind as you’re getting ready for work. 

You stop and get the same thing from the same cafe and park in the same parking spot. Today should be Friday, meaning today should be a short day. You walk into your boss’s office and he sends you on the same errand as yesterday. He asks for toast from the bakery in the lobby. Confused, you think nothing of it and head to the elevator. As you’re approaching it, you look outside to see that it’s getting dark and starting to rain. You start panicking and decide to take the stairs instead. When you open the door to the stairwell, you wake up in your bed. It was a dream, you said to yourself.