I dreamed I was riding a bus to school and the driver started to complain about how he was tired of taking the same route to work every morning. He took the bus off-road into a field for a couple of loops, then back on the road. Then he decided we were going to take a "before school field trip". Turning down a dirt road, he drove the bus several miles though a forest until we finally came to a fenced in area. There was a shack off to one side, a small damaged parking deck, and what looked like a partially gutted hotel.
The driver announced that he had been born here - and that it was still his home. We were a little creeped out - but went on inside the hotel lobby. While we were looking around a young asian woman opened the front door, poked her head in, and told us that "you shouldn't be in here".
I replied "That's good enough for me, let's get the hell out of here," and then the panic spread to all of us and we freaked, en mass. We all ran out the door to the bus, the fear now overwhelming, but still unexplained. After piling on the bus we realized that everyone was there, except the driver. No sign of him and no sound from the hotel. We shouted for him for a few moments, but the panic continued to grow. Finally, someone shouted out "Leave him!" and I got in the driver's seat and started the bus. It was a manual transmission - and I don't know how to drive those - but I didn't seem to have any problems. A few hairpin turns at high speed in a bus and then down a hill. I saw the next hill coming up and it looked to be an impossibly steep grade. I floored it, trying to build up enough momentum to make it up that hill. I remember the sound of the engine straining, the silence of my passengers, and the pounding of my heart. We made it up the hill, barely, and then the other side was almost straight down. Now I was fighting the brakes, trying to reduce speed without burning them up.
At the bottom of the hill was a building and I had to abruptly turn to avoid hitting it. With the bus slowed down and under control, I came to a stop and realized the building we missed was the shack on the fenced in property. We had driven miles away from this place and somehow ended up right back where we started. I realized it wasn't just a trick of the turns of the road, we had somehow been caught in a loop. Space had folded in on itself.
Carefully, we got out of the bus with the intention of looking around and trying to perhaps find the driver. The fear was still there, but mixed with a compulsion to explore the hotel. We entered the hotel, and foolishly split up. I started seeing my classmates moving impossibly fast and to areas of the hotel that were clearly unable to support their weight. Except they weren't my classmates, they were duplicates. Some kind of ghostly or demonic Doppelganger. I saw people get tricked into falling into holes in the floor, or pushed off the upper stories to fall to their deaths. I managed to avoid most of the monsters in human form, but one young man cornered me in the second floor hallway and announced - "I'm the sister"
Dream awareness kicked in - the knowledge of a situation in a dream that just arises to fill in. I realized that all these duplicates were shape shifted ghosts of people that had stay at, lived, or worked at this hotel. And they were pissed off. The driver had been the first one taken since he had lived at this hotel. I got the feeling the ghosts had waited until he brought more people there - maybe even compelled him to do so. And then trapped us all in a loop.
I got past the boy, then had to fight my way down the stairs. I saw my classmates get torn apart as the vengeful ghosts gave up on clever tricks and resorted to simple violence. I got past them, though and made my way outside. A few others had made it out as well and we scrambled to the bus. I got in the driver's seat and glanced back at the ghosts standing in front of the hotel, the daylight not bothering them a bit - nor making them appear any less solid. I started up the bus, and got us back on the road - this time heading back the way we came, instead of forward. I hoped this would be enough to break us free from the loop and get us out of there, but I knew in my heart that it wasn't going to work. That we would be on the road until we ran out of gas and never get away from that hotel.
I was worrying about how much worse it would be when night fell when I finally heard my alarm clock and woke up.
