Status: ted the caver had nothing on me (jk)

hi again. slight apology for the gap in posts, after i wrote the last one i decided i'd wait to follow up until i went to the hotel again. i just woke up from a pretty bland trip, and last time i said something about describing certain parts of the hotel, so here goes.

one quick note: i got a legit shocking number of comments on my last post from more people claiming they've been to the hotel. a couple people even said they might've seen/spoken to me, but one didn't give a description of themself and the other one was too basic for me to know for sure. sorry /paladinjohn87, but i do see a lot of medium-build white guys with brown hair and video game t-shirts.

anyway, i think i mentioned this last time, but ever since i've been going to the hotel, i've woken up in room number 1071. as far as i can tell, it's pretty deep in the underbelly of the place, which i appreciate. the higher up you go past the lobby floor (against my own better judgement, i checked last night - the lobby is 36 floors above mine), the weirder shit gets. a lot of the rooms actually stop being hotel rooms. they're just... empty concrete boxes, with numbers on the door but no keycard reader and nothing inside. i would guess that these are rooms that have never had a guest inside, if we assume that every guest has their own specific room like i do, and if we also assume that the rooms "generate" themselves whenever someone first wakes up there.

that's another thing i want to elaborate more on. i don't know if i've made it clear enough yet, but there are a lot of people in this hotel, all the time. it's an impossibly big building for a reason. people from all over the world go to sleep and then, by chance or fate or god knows what, they find themselves in this place. it's like some kind of dream waystation. people pass through. most of them probably think it's just a regular dream - usually, people are wandering around in a kind of fugue state, having the most bizarro conversations with each other (last night i came across a couple of guys standing in the middle of a hallway and talking about an invasive garden hose infestation, i'm not kidding).

it's very rare that people are lucid here. i also think it's pretty rare to do what i do, and go there over and over again. even other "repeats" (there's this woman i find sometimes sitting next to a specific soda machine, crocheting something that looks like a thneed and muttering about how the oven is on fire but she just has to finish this row up) are pretty out of it. i'm not saying i'm special or whatever, but i kind of just... am? i've never met someone else like me here. (well...that's not totally true, but we'll get to her soon enough, i'm sure).

oh, and like i said last time, you can't take objects into the hotel with you. if you fall asleep, say, with your wallet in your pocket, you won't have it in the hotel. objects do appear, though, usually somewhere in your room. there's always a baseball bat wrapped in an impossibly-lit string of white lights in mine, which i use against Rabbithead (ghosts and demonic entities hate light, especially artificial light, so it's highly effective). the thneed lady, i'm assuming, wakes up with a bunch of crochet materials in her room. but the only things that come with you into the hotel, and can leave with you, are whatever clothes you're currently wearing. which i mention because it's interesting (and also why i sleep in jeans sometimes, i swear i'm not a serial killer), but also because... well, if you sleep naked... let's just say i've seen a lot more wrinkly ballsacks than one woman should ever have to bear at the wee age of 20.

now for the tour of relevant places!

room 1071 is like most other rooms in the hotel with no name. i want you to imagine the most drab, nonspecific, slightly downtrodden hotel room you can think of. that empty smell of cleaner on top of uncleanliness. the buzzing AC box under the window (which looks out on pitch black, btw; i always keep the curtains drawn in my room). the plain white sheets and pillows with that stupid little skinny "blanket" thing laying across the mattress near the foot of the bed. the most un-ergonomic desk chair in existence, the TV with 4 channels (all of them are static here), the nice little minimalist lamp on the nightstand. there's always a keycard on the nightstand too, but it's completely pointless, because your room is always unlocked for you.

the shower is spittly and either way too hot or way too cold. oh and for the record, because you obviously need to know this, you can in fact pee in the dream here and not pee in real life. i took the risk once. it's amazing.

all of the rooms are exactly like this, from what i've seen. the only difference is who wakes up there and what items might be waiting for them. like i said, for me it's usually the baseball bat. so i pick up the bat - it's plain wood and very solid; the string lights are a closed circular chain that's twisted around the bat from grip to top - and head out.

now for the relevant non-room rooms.

from 1071, if you go down two flights of stairs and walk right for a while, then take the first left and keep walking for a while more, you'll reach the lounge. it's this dark, grubby little miserable hole of a place that reeks like piss and cigarettes and bad cologne. the men who sit at the bartop are all fake. they're all hunched over, hidden under broad-brimmed hats or long coats, and if you watch them long enough they repeat the same motions over and over. they'll wrap their fingers around the top of their glass or light a tobacco pipe or whisper to each other. if you touch them, nothing happens. if you talk to them, nothing happens. which is good, because i like to lean up against this little guy in a mustard yellow trench coat and complain about my headaches. i don't know why i picked him. he has a similar posture to my dad, so maybe that's something (please refrain from commenting on my daddy issues below, i'm giving you much more interesting things to cyberbully me over). the wall behind the bar is a big mirror, and if you can squint past the smoke and the rows of half-empty bottles, you'll notice that none of these guys have reflections.

everyone else in the lounge is real, though. all other dreamers. actually, with two other notable exceptions, everyone in the hotel is real. i'll get to that in a second. anyway, the rest of the room is taken up by sticky round tables, which are usually all occupied, and in the back corner is a little stage with a silver pole. sometimes the woman from entry 12 is there. she's also real, unfortunately. there's always music playing, but focusing on it usually freaks me out so bad i wake up, so i can't describe it. insert whatever you think the grossest, most ear-grating music is and it's probably that.

on one side of the lounge is an ice room with an empty soda machine (there are lots of these all over the hotel), and on the other side is an arcade. none of the games work except for frogger.

if you go down seven more flights of stairs and go left, right, right, and left, you'll find yourself at the pool. i fucking hate the pool, not least because of the dead girl in it. the whole courtyard is covered by slimy green tile, with a few pool chairs that look like they'd snap in half if you tried to sit on them. there are no towels to be found, and the air is boiling in there, which is weird considering it's outside and you can hear the wind in the trees beyond the hotel. no wind penetrates that little courtyard, though. the air is like soup. the water in the pool is constantly churning, and for some reason you can't see the bottom, though the depth-markers claim it only goes to 8 feet. sometimes there's this gross wet slapping-sucking sound, like water got stuck in the filter or something, but it sounds... thick.

the girl herself is actually pretty unremarkable. she's in a grey dress that might've been velvet, once, but the water has turned it more into sludge. she floats on her stomach, so you can't see her face thank god, and she has so much hair it seems like it swallows up half the damn pool. but the pool is big. much bigger than a normal one.

she never decays. there are no marks on her body. no blood in the water. if i stayed long enough, for some reason i get the sense she'd tell me what happened to her. i really do not want to know.

i've been rambling for ages, sorry. you all asked for this, though.

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Naomi notes that "with two other notable exceptions, everyone in the hotel is real." This line was never properly elaborated on, and it is,, believe it or not, a source of major strife within her community.

Since she wrote that she would get to it in a second, it's possible the two people she's referring to are the girl in the pool and the front desk worker. For a while this was the most prominent theory. There are some notable flaws with this theory, however. For one, there does not seem to be an actual front desk worker, only the sounds of someone in the room behind the counter. For another, the girl in the pool is real. This is later proven by Naomi's own accounts, but even in this early entry, she describes the girl in a way that indicates her awareness. Given these facts, it is unclear who exactly these two exceptions are. There are theories that she's referring to Rabbithead, but this seems highly unlikely, since Rabbithead is, according to her description, capable of inflicting lasting physical damage. Naomi takes its presence very seriously. Some have also speculated that she's referring to the woman from entry twelve, but just a few sentences after mentioning these exceptions she explicitly describes that woman as "unfortunately" real. There are no other details or mentions in any other entries that give further insight on this issue, and as such it has become a large point of debate and contention.