Book room dream

A recurrence the other day of a dream I used to have from time to time in the past, although not for several years.

A small room, somewhere downstairs in our house, somewhere near both the kitchen and the back door, but not the house we live in now, in Epsom. Full of shelving for books made out of two by two white wood studding and half inch ply shelves. Not all that old. Not unlike the sort of thing you get in second division book fairs, say the ones run by the people at reference 1.

Maybe half full of books, with the idea being that it is used to store the books which I am unlikely to ever want but cannot bring myself to throw away. From time to time, I do actually want to consult one of the books there. And I do quite like to poke around from time to time anyway: maybe there is something there which I would like to look at. Maybe just to visit old friends.

On this occasion, the book room seemed to be spread over two storeys of some  kind of an apartment, set in some kind of office building, probably one of the civil service buildings which I had known in the world of work, although exactly how all this worked, particularly the two storey business, as is often the way with dreams, was not made clear.

And when I went to visit it, I found that the builders had been in. The books had all vanished, the shelving dismantled and mainly removed. Just a few stumps and bits left. I think there was building work going on in the rest of the building, but it was still all very puzzling. Not to say upsetting. All those treasures from the past vanished.

Wake up. Doesn't take long to work out that I had been dreaming. But it does take long to work out that there never was such a room.

As it happened, the very same morning, a few hours later, we visited a rather cluttered secondhand bookshop, not that unlike that illustrated above. Which was the best that google could do, but which does not have quite the right tone for the dream. The dominant colour should not be brown, the shelves should not be so crowded and they should not run up to the ceiling.

PS: the reference to second division is not intended to be derogatory. What I mean is that I am reasonably likely to come across something that I both want and can afford, which happens only very rarely in the first division.

Reference 1: http://www.pbfa.org/.