I am standing in the lobby of a nice hotel with a small crowd of people rating like I am to check in at one of the several windows of the front desk, each staffed by an attractive young woman. The clerks seem friendly but the crowd is disorganized and somehow each time my turn to check in comes up, someone is in front of me. Even when I finally reach the front and am about to go up to the window, a tall woman In a green suit walks up to the window in front of me.
In a cubicle to the left of the check-in desk a short black man announces that he is going to change his clothes. I and others consider looking away but the man immediately removes his shirt. His nipples are very odd. Square in cross-section, about an inch thick and three inches long with a short conical tip, they protrude from his chest and curl down like flaccid penises, though that comparison does not occur to me in the dream. The man is about to remove his pants but before he does, he walks under the desk in the adjacent cubicle. He is very round and so short that his head does not even touch the underside of the desk. A thoughtful young woman, realizing the man's need for privacy, sits down on the floor in front of the desk.

Giving up on trying to check in, I go out to our van in the parking lot. I am sharing our room with an unidentified male friend but at the car, I find a woman with long dark hair who also needs a room. I suggest that she stay in our room explaining, in part to reassure her that I am not coming on to her, that she would need to sleep on the floor. She responds that she will sleep in the bed and I can sleep on the floor. I make it clear that I will sleep in the bed and she on the floor, but that we have plenty of sleeping pads and bedding that she can use. I pack up the bedding in a box and take it with me back into the hotel.

In the hotel, I go into the restaurant and attempt to serve myself some soup from a square warming pot on a table. A couple of other people are successfully serving themselves but I am somehow unable to do so, either by ladling the soup out of the open top of the container or by putting my bowl under the spout at one end of the container where soup is continually pouring out. The problem might be that I do not have a bowl but when I go to pick one up, I see that there are none left.
Giving up on getting some soup, I go to a another serving table which has deck pans under heat lamps. I do not get any food but instead get help from a server behind the table, a black man I think, to put the cover back onto my box of bedding. I hold the box, which now looks like the box that a dozen donuts might come in, while the man successfully slides the cover onto it.

Returning to the lobby, I find that the crowd has dissipated and I will have no trouble checking in.

The first scene of this dream immediately reminded me of the story I wrote + for the Story Workshop a few years ago, which describes my shame at being too timid to go to the front of the crowd to be served, except that in the dream I felt no shame about my failure to check in or my inability to serve myself soup. The black man in the cubicle also appears to feel no shame about his peculiar nipples but in the dream, I interpret his lack of shame as a social, or perhaps mental, deficiency. It is not clear why he gets under the desk; perhaps he feels embarrassed by the attention of the crowd, which is perhaps why the young woman goes over and sits down in front of the desk, an act of kindness. Another act of kindness appears in the third scene when the server helps me put the cover back on my box. I clearly understood that I needed his help but I do not recall if I asked for it.
In the second scene of the dream it is I who extend kindness to another, but when the woman demands, inappropriately in my opinion, more than I was offering to her, I stand firm and do not give in. I believe that suggests that my kindness is not derived from a sense of obligation but rather from a desire to help derived from empathy with her situation.