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It's like a bookstore, game store, and video store of epic proportions. I can have whole dreams of just wandering around the place, gahhhhhh.

Anyone else have dreamed up places they wished existed?

The other day I told someone I generally don't dream about libraries. Or the same place twice. I forgot about this place. I guess people really do have dream libraries. I keep dreaming about there being extensions off of my house, rooms that have course always been there, we just keep forgetting to go into. Sometimes rooms that were in the house that I lived in when I was under six, grafted onto the house I live in now. Often, these rooms appear scaled up, so that a young woman has as much trouble looking over the counters as a child would. Usually, they're either in the second, deeper basement, or on the fifth or sixth story, making them hard to get to and a bit chilly, so no one bothers to go that far most of the time. It also makes them be on stories that don't exist in my house, so I can't go there.

These rooms always look slightly more messy then the rest of the house; like disused rooms are. Items that clearly don't belong there crowd the entryways as we try to make room in the parts of the house we can afford to heat. There's often dust and sheets over the furniture, but not always. I remember that not all of the basement is lit, and the parts that are, you need to turn on the power to that room before you turn on the lights. Even still, they gutter to life in that way out fluorescent lights do, flickering occasionally and making the shadows move. I've seen a few levels of basement, with crawl spaces. There's a second attic that's been fixed up to work in, which sometimes has people in it, in their own little alcoves. These aren't strictly separate rooms, but old furniture which has been pulled together and arranged in a room-like shape to make it easier to use and give a sense of personal space. I think Willow was in her alcove in the dream, reading or using a laptop. And I'm fairly sure there was a potted fern in her alcove. Or a series of them, making a sort of roof above an old fainting couch. Not a terribly fancy one, but it looked comfortable and pretty cool.
There's also a second library off that attic. The library was also made out of furtnature, mostly bookshelves of various heights so you can't see the back from the entrance. There are two old couches, back to back at the entryway, with rows of bookshelves set up behind them. Near the entrance was an old desk, which I think was full of papers and old things.

Last night, I visited my library.
I was trying to get my head into a good work space when I suddenly realize that the library would be a great place to work. In this way, I was very much the same me in the dream as I am in real life; a young lady who tries to be polite and get a set amount of creative work done each day. I think I was also wearing a petticoat, but me wearing a petticoat on any given day is sort of a fifty-fifty thing. Not a huge loli petticoat, but I am fairly sure my skirt had a certain amount of swing to it. I thought about setting up my laptop on the desk and going deep into the library with my sketchbook; slightly passive aggressively. It was passive aggressive in that I didn't want to be disturbed, and I figured if my family needed to look behind a bookshelf to see me, they wouldn't unless it was really important.

I gather my laptop and sketchbook and start my way to the library. Once I'm in the second attic, almost at the entrance to the library, a clowder of cats, mostly kittens who looked to be about the same age ran past my feet. I recognized a few of them as cats that had gone missing years ago and cats I thought were dead. I was very excited about seeing them again, but somehow I felt reassured by seeing them and felt that I didn't need to. I was going to be working in the library all afternoon. They would come to me when they wanted my attention.

I set my laptop on the desk at the entrance to library and wandered into it. Nominally, I was looking for a place to sit and start work, but mostly I was fascinated by the different bookshelves and how they all hid each other. Occasionally, there would be an old armchair stuck between the bookshelves, usually with a half-read book splayed over it's arm or a stack in the seat. As I began to reach the far wall, the proper wall with windows in it, I saw something, rather someone, huddled in the corner.

He appeared to be an old homeless man with a thick, messy beard, wrapped up in a tatty old blanket, and he was crying softly. As I came upon him, he stopped crying and looked up at me in surprise. For a moment, both of us stared at each other; as neither had expected to see anyone else in the library. I remember clutching my sketchbook to my chest protectively.
"Oh dear." he said. "You live here, don't you?"
"Evidently, so do you." I answered.
"I suppose you want me to clear out, then. Get off your property?" he sounded like he might start crying again.
Now that I have a moment to think about it, his voice was almost exactly like Leonard Nimoy's, not the young way he sounded on Star Trek but that comforting, aged way he sounds now.
"I'd much rather know why you're crying."
He stared at me for just a moment.
"You must be a perfect person." he said.
"Not really." I answered, slightly flustered. "I was just raised a lady."
As I talked to him, my eyes kept shifting between seeing an old homeless man cowering in a corner behind a bookcase and a shaggy, lion-like creature. I don't remember the next line of dialouge exactly.
"I'm terribly sorry, but when I look at you I keep seeing this-- shaggy orange lionine fellow." I said, rubbing my eyes.
"Really?" he asked, sounding surprised. Not by the description, but by me.
"Is that what you really are?" I asked.
"Well-- yes." the Shaggy Man chuckled.
"Is that why you're homeless?" I asked with interest.

Sadly, this is where I woke up. I really want to know more about the Shaggy Man. As my brain as started to call him. Upon waking, the whole business of deciding to work in the library sounds a great deal like the start of The Salem Horror by Henry Kuttner. But with less rats and ancient evil.

I'm fairly sure the next few lines of dialouge include,
"I was also raised a witch. Not a crystaly witch, but a Prachetty witch. You know, seeing things as they really are." Now that I write that down, I think it might have actually been said in the dream. The word "Prachetty" sounds familiar.