Yet another metamorphosis

It started out just like any Saturday morning. Josh had his coffee and biscuits topped with jelly, put on his suit, kissed his kids on the forehead, smacked his lips together in a faux kiss to his wife, and was out the door. On the way to the synagogue he whistled a tune and observed the hustle and bustle of the town which was similar in intensity to the rest of the week but yet markedly more festive. Once he got inside, he went up the five flights of stairs, walked around the main sanctuary where the rabbi was delivering his sermon, and slipped in through the back door, his entrance noticed only by as few eyes as possible, as was his intent.

The next hour and a half did not contain anything remarkable in and of itself, either. He spaced out for most of that time, vocalizing the words imprinted in his memory through years of repetition. Once every so often someone or other across the divider in the women's section caught his eye, but he quickly looked away, once again a reflex honed by years of training. This time he didn't stay too long for the drinks, bagels, and dessert following services. He had just a tiny sip of scotch to warm up his insides, walked through the crowd greeting and saying goodbye in the same breath, and walked out into the stairwell.

At first, he didn't notice anything strange. Descending from the fifth floor which his congregation rented on Saturdays, he passed the fourth floor with the yoga class, the third with the kids' karate school, and the second floor whose function he was not privy to, as the door leading inside was always closed. He buttoned his jacket in preparation for going outside and turned the corner onto what was supposed to be the steps leading out to the lobby. Instead, he was greeted with the sight of just more stairs.

Reasoning he must have miscounted the floors, Josh chuckled to himself, and walked down two more half-flights. The same image presented itself, however. It looked like the landing between the second and the third floors, or maybe the third and the fourth - he wasn't sure. The door leading into the floor was closed, which was not unusual for this time of day. "This is a bit strange, perhaps I've miscounted the extent of my miscounting", he thought, letting out yet another chuckle.

Rotating another full turn down the stairwell, the scene was repeated once more. At this point Josh started to question the reality of the events, and wondered if he was, in fact, still in bed viewing the remnants of his dream, and would wake up any minute to repeat his coffee, suit, and praying routine, this time in actuality. Not particularly enjoying the thought of that, he decided to instead chalk it up to his recent state of general tiredness and lack of sleep - which he then and there resolved to improve. Focusing back on reality, he proceeded further down the stairs. It was the same unidentifiable landing, the door closed, the same plaster walls devoid of any unique markings, the same railing going up and down and disappearing around the bend. This added a sizable infusion of validity to the hypothesis that he was asleep, however the the entire morning's events felt too vividly real. Besides, Josh was never able to achieve any kind of state of lucid dreaming, despite several attempts in his youth, inspired by reading about it in some magazine article.

For the next several minutes, he ran down a dozen or so more flights down the staircase , tried running back up (only to reach the same looking landing at each turn, albeit with considerably more effort), and attempted to bang on and to open the door, which only responded with a loud metallic thud. He stopped, and excited by the possibility that this could finally be his first ever lucid dream ("and without even trying! maybe it's something I ate last night?") , he tried to imagine himself flying, as was the instruction in that magazine piece. Nothing happened, his feet were still firmly planted on the ground, and after several attempts he gave that idea up. He pinched the skin of his hand and experienced the ordinary painful sensation, then with his fist, hit a wall,  which only affirmed its solidity and the still continuing ability to inflict pain on his knuckles. Slowly, the possibility was dawning on Joshua that this was not a hallucination or an illusion or the product of his imagination gone wild, but rather something with a substantively more real component. His rational mind resisted any such thoughts, but this rationality kept being slowly eroded by the combination of the extraordinarily normal behavior of objects within his reach (such as his body, the walls, the flickering lights on the ceiling and so on) and the extraordinarily bizarre configuration he found himself and these objects in.

Josh didn't remember exactly how many hours ago panic began to set in, but that feeling of helplessness and terror crept into his mind at first as a tiny spark, and then continued growing within, enveloping and redirecting all of his thoughts to itself. The panic did not stem from anything that his body physically lacked, although he was very thirsty at this point, nor did it arise from any sense of danger or a fear for his safety. Rather, it was entirely from the utter incomprehensibility of the situation, and from the doubt he was now assigning to anything and everything he has ever thought or known to be true. His thoughts traced back over and over to the morning, to discover, perhaps, any sign or portent of what was impending, any event that he might have missed that could have possibly caused all of this. But he found nothing - nothing stood out, and the change of gears from the ordinary into the irrational happened quietly and imperceptibly, when he exited from the fifth floor and started his initial descent. His watch now showed that it was 6pm, and he wondered if it was already dark outside, and whether outside existed anymore, or if it even ever existed. He sat down on the floor, his body aching from walking what must have been hundreds of flights today, leaned against the metal door, and closed his eyes.