The upper floors are always abandoned

Ground floor: busy, lit, almost plausible. Second floor: quieter, a few shops open, the music thinner. Third floor and up: paper over the storefront glass, half the fluorescents flickering or out, and escalators that still run as if they haven't been told.

The pattern repeats in report after report. The mall empties as you rise, and yet nearly everyone who dreams the upper floors keeps going up. Myself included. There is something up there that wants finding — or the sensation of that, which in a dream is the same thing.

What have you found on your upper floors? Open stores where there shouldn't be any? Other people? I have twice found a single shop fully lit and staffed three floors above the last living thing, and both times I woke before I could read its sign.