A dream scene, but what does it mean?

When I dream I am always looking for something
A lost place in the past that I try to find
Through the rambling wanderings of the dreams
Never successful in reaching my destination
Before the cruel sun banishes my secret world

Ahead of me I see stairs leading down
Hard concrete sending remorseless shocks up my legs
As I jar myself with each impacting step down
Hurrying, tumbling, an out of control descent
Cold, it's so cold in here, in the stairwell
The haze of old memories obscures the hallway outside
A door to my right beckons me to enter with no sound
Here are wooden floorboards worn by time
Dirty blinds half closed
Pale, inconsequential fluorescent lights
Substituting their sickly pall for the moon

	Who is that by the window?

Her face, framed in golden hair, pale and wan
Eyes dead and gray in the moonlit shadows across her face
She turns from the window, now facing me
I see her eyes, watery and pale, and her hair, limp and lifeless

A hollow voice on the verge of tears offers a soliloquy:

    After seventeen years what do you hope to find here?
    These long nights of wandering are futile
    There is nothing new here for you to find
    No secrets or hidden understandings in the darkness
    Nothing here but your own tortured memories

    Why can't you just let me go?
    You've kept me here as a prisoner
    A ghost locked in your memories
    Who can no longer remember sunlight

    Year after miserable year you wallow in this same dream
    What more could I do for you?
    I launched your ten thousand ships
    (What a hideous poem!) 
    And I was the fuel that burned your youthful ideas
    Of beauty, inspiration, and Romantic nonsense
    Magnified by your mind like the echoes of ancient shouts
    Which you could barely hear ringing in the corridors of time
    In a warped adolescent mind trying to cope with reality
    But now it traps you so that you can never move on
    No creativity is possible under the weight of such constraint

    You finally see me as I am
    Old and worn out
    The flower of youth long since withered
    In soil sere and dried out

    A dead flower pressed between the pages of a yearbook
    Where that photo is always smiling and young
    Would that I had always been like that!
    Everyone thought I was beautiful
    They all wanted me
    Now I'm older and past the blossom of youth
    Gaunt and worn by my years
    No one looks at me twice anymore

    So I am a beggar woman
    Appealing to you
    Begging you
    To set me free

She turned to look over her shoulder out the window
Her neck pale and taut with barely controlled tension

I whisper to her: "Good night"

The figure by the window vanished into the misty moonlight
My mind's eye had let the past go
And the ghosts fluttered away into the night
Never to return
I was free

The world dissolved around me
The building collapsing in flames
The night banished by the pure light of day
A crack in the foundations of the world I had made
Time itself resumes from its suspension
And I am propelled forward across a frozen landscape

Cold wind blowing and a washed-out gray sky overhead
Darkness extends to the horizon with only a few bare trees
Scratching out warnings along the dull skyline
As the wind blows where it wills oblivious to my presence 
From infinity to infinity in both directions
Stretches a rock wall not three feet in height
Stones laid dry pressed by the weight of the ages
I walk downhill and get closer and closer to the wall
Nothing left for me and nothing left of me but to go for it
Take that final decisive step over the low rock wall
Into the nothingness which awaits me on the other side