Recurrent theme: Second hand bookstore

There are certain places which I revisit again and again in my dreams. These are places I’ve never seen in real life, but which obviously are saved somewhere in my memory. Perhaps dreams have their own memory and their own reality?

One example is this second hand bookstore I keep visiting. It’s rarely in the same place, but often it appears in places I know but suddenly look completely different from what they really do. Once (on the 12. of September last year, according to my dream journal) it was in the small town where I went to school as a kid, and where I now work. A road goes parallel to the train tracks through the town centre, and there are some stores there, a video rental shop, and a pizza place. But in this dream there were lots of stores lined up all the way from the roundabout to the petrol station (which is to say all through the centre), and I think this has happened before in my dreams as well. Also, this road’s name is the same as my surname, only with the word “road” after it. I’m not sure if this bears any significance, but I choose not to ignore it…

In the dream it made perfect sense that the road looked like it did, as if it had always been like that. I was looking for something, but even as I wrote it down in my journal I couldn’t remember what it was. In searching for whatever it was I ended up inside this second hand bookstore which in my dreams is so familiar to me. Shelves after shelves with second hand books, some hidden, some on display. I imagine somehow that the books I look for in there, and the books I find and decide to buy even when I’m not looking for anything particular, not to mention the books on display, are of some significance to me. That they hold a sort of key or a kind of hint that I could and perhaps should try to interpret. But I have never thought about this until this journal entry from September.But on with the dream: I’m standing there on the ground floor of the book shop, trying to remember what books I wanted to look for. I knew I’d heard of some recently that I wanted to read. I decided to have a look around while thinking. To the right when you come in the door there were some pocket books on display on a “pall”. I recognized the titles of the Twilight books, but the covers were completely different – there were no photos on them, only big, brightly coloured letters. I don’t know what these books were doing in my dream, because I have no interest in reading them, but in my journal I’d made a note on having read in a newspaper the day before about how popular True Blood is, and that it might have planted the idea of vampires in my head. Who knows?

I walked up the stairs to the first floor (which reminded me of the upstairs of Rock’n’Rolls in Oslo, by the way) where they had some records as well as books. Probably music books, though I don’t remember. A man working there presented me with a Best of Aha- album (which again is of no interest to me), but when I opened the cover there weren’t CDs inside, but old-fashioned tapes.

All the time I was there, I felt a little bad because I knew I was supposed to be looking for something else, which they wouldn’t have in this store. Or maybe it was a person I was looking for? I can’t remember.And there ends the dream.

This second hand books store has also been in other places I know, like where my Mom grew up (next to a bridge, where there is in fact a kiosk – and has been for as long as my Mom can remember). It has also been in the neighbor town which then looks different, and so much bigger. The store is really difficult to find there – I know because I’ve tried several times in different dreams, and I often get lost looking for it. When I do find it there, it’s often by chance. But I know at least that in this town it’s based on a real second hand book- and record shop that used to be there when I was in high school. I loved that place! I’ve also “seen” the store in Oslo, or some other big city.I’ve found a lot of nice books there, like some particularly pretty ones from the Literary Classics-series (most of those I’ve found when the book store is in Mom’s home town, from some reason). One of them was Jonathan Swift’s collected works, and I remember this book was green. I’m sure Amazon can tell me if this book has ever been released in this series, and whether it was in fact green.

When I wrote about this in my journal, I was actually a bit worried. I’ve had other repetitive dreams and dreamscapes disappear after having told people about them, and this second hand book store has somehow come to mean a lot to me. I’m not sure why. I finish the entry off by writing “But now it’s too late, and it’ll be interesting to see if I’ll ever see this place again…”

Anyway, the point of this extremely long entry is that a couple of days ago I dreamed about this store again, for the first time since I wrote about it in September! And again I was there when I was really supposed to be somewhere else (a work, I think). But the interesting thing was that the records were on the ground floor this time, and the books on the first floor. But whenever I tried going up the stairs there was something in the way. First there were several boxes on the steps so I couldn’t get past it. In another part of the store the stairs were of the kind where there’s a big gap between the steps so you can look down between them. This scared me so much (because of my fear of heights) that I didn’t dare. There was something else as well that hindered me, and I never got up in the book department of the store, which is usually the place where I spend the most time in these dreams…

I don’t know what to make of any of this, but I find it really interesting that when I finally dream about it again, I can't actually enter my favourite part of it...