A friend of mine and I have both been having persistent dreams about being lost/trapped in buildings. For me, it's a shopping mall/hotel complex with a weird princess-themed restaurant, in which I have tried, unsuccessfully, to pick up waitresses in hoop skirts and tiaras. Comparatively, his is a much more normal, multi-story maze of rooms. In my dream, I'm usually just wandering around, lost, while he has a very definite need to escape the building.
My thoughts so far:
Okay, so Zolar's Dictionary (Amazon link here: http://tinyurl.com/ly9p9r) says a dream of a very tall building indicates you "will have much success." Faces of strangers means you will have a "change of residence," while being stuck in a maze could mean you either, "are surrounded by unhappiness," or should, "beware of domination by insincere friends."
But that's all just a bunch of new age mumbo-jumbo.
The wife (who's had more psych classes than I) says that a building in a dream is a symbol for one's own mind. So if I were to play shrink, I'd say that the "unknown but important reason" for you to get out of the maze is that your mind is trying to work it's way through some problem.
If that's true, then the "lost in a building" dream is probably a pretty common one, much like the "showing up for a test completely unprepared" dream that most of us have had at least once. The particulars of these dreams, of course, vary from person to person, and focusing on those particulars may give some insight into what our mind is trying to tell us.
For me, the dreams always center around retail environments. That makes sense, considering that I spend most of my offline time trying to sell things. The sense of being lost is, I think, a projection of my desire to, once and for all, figure out how to be really good at selling. To extend the metaphor, the failed attempt with the waitress could be my fear of failing with a customer.
Why she's wearing a hoop skirt and tiara (and waving a little fairy-wand, now that I think about it) is anybody's guess.
