Dreamscapes

TAJ/CUR_2026-02: An interrupted dream sequence and some reflections of Freudian memory

The air in the library is stiff, it smells like wet soil after a spring shower. I move to sit on a wooden chair and I almost miss it, since I can’t take my eyes off of the shelves. They cover every wall in the room, from the bottom to the ceiling, which opens towards the light blue sky, stained by thin clouds. It’s going to rain tomorrow. The people around me are chattering and moving, I know some of them since childhood, others I’ve never met them. There’s a bird with shiny green feathers flapping its wings around the room, bringing light to the far end of the library and suddenly getting in a glass cage, a sort of open crystal ball, nestled within the walls of the building. Everyone looks up at it and sighs in wonder. A teacher explains that the bird is an exemplar of a rare species, that the school funded a project to preserve the few remaining ones. We get up and out of the library. The door gives way to a white hallway: the floor, the walls, the steps of the staircase reflect the light coming from a huge window that runs across the whole school. How weird that in the same building you can find a library of the 1600s and a hallway that seems to be coming from a decade far in the future. The professor goes on explaining something, while everyone follows him to another room. I see myself standing in front of the window, but I can’t tell what’s behind the glass. My reflection adjusts her hair and notices it got longer again, almost knee length like when I was fifteen. I am fifteen. I wear the same t-shirt I have in a photo I took on vacation, the fabric still sits uncomfortably on my skin.

Then a sharp sound brings me back to my room, and it feels awful, I imagine it must be like breathing for the first time. Birds are chirping loudly outside my closed blinds. They’re always so talkative and active in the morning, unlike me. I want to go back to the library, not because I liked the place, but because I miss how I used to feel there. Even in my most absurd dreams, I experience a deep sense of safety, lightness, sharpness of mind: no matter what nonsense I say or happens, it’s always necessary. Nothing really feels weird in dreams. It’s after the torpor of sleep has left the body and the night fog has lifted from the brain, that, logical schemes in hand, subconscious visions start blurring in a strange sequence of events and words spoken in a state of oblivion sound unintelligible. Then comes the urgent need to understand the reason behind a dream.

So, as a member of my generation, used to looking things up whenever I want, I find myself googling “dreaming libraries”, “dreaming birds”, “dreaming the colour green”. I read that dreaming of libraries and bookstores symbolises a desire for exploration and knowledge and birds are a positive signal for change and opportunities in real life. And while a part of my brain attempts to interpret the results of my research like tea leaves at the bottom of an empty cup, the other tells me it’s all nonsense: I didn’t feel the need to learn new things, or the excitement for a new life while I was dreaming. All I felt really was the blissful embrace of absurdity.

‘There are things which cannot fully happen. They are too big to be accommodated in an event, and too wonderful. They only try to happen.’

[‘The Hourglass Sanatorium’, 1973]

Humans seem to find dreams quite fascinating: we study them, picking apart each object and action, developing theories on how our mind works when we’re asleep. Sleep itself is a pretty interesting activity, a temporary reset of the body, while the neurons keep firing, storing information, appraising ideas and generating solutions. Some believe dreams have a role in all of this: we dream every night because it helps us to elaborate our emotions and the inputs we received from our senses throughout the day. Or they might just be a side effect of sleep, a trick some part of the mind plays on the other when we let go of our control over both of them. Dreams seem to take us to a different dimension, but they could also just bring us closer to life.

The background of every dreamscape is a picture taken from reality. But what doesn’t make sense in a dream is not clarified when we’re awake, because even real life is often unexplainable, strange, surreal. Logic doesn’t shape events and people, it tries to explain them after they’re already born. We’re used to dividing our world in categories, and everything that doesn’t fit our predictions is unexpected and absurd, dream-like. Life often doesn’t fit though, it can’t: it overflows our mental schemes, so much that I think the relief I feel when I’m dreaming is just my mind dropping its expectation of being able to understand. I’m not there to make sense of things, but only to experience them.

‘Because life, for all the brazen absurdities, big and small, which is full of, has the priceless privilege of going without that stupid realism, which art believes it must obey to.’

[‘Warning towards the scruples of fantasy’, Luigi Pirandello]

For obvious reasons, I couldn’t go back to bed and finish my dream. But I ended up going to a library in the morning, smelling the same comforting scent of old books and uncatalogued records. I didn’t see any green bird on my way there, though, or anything green that could’ve caught my attention and convinced me that it was “a sign of positive change”. But between the shelves, I felt glimpses of the same feeling of safety I’d felt in my dream. Entering certain places, reality is something you leave at the door.

Thanks for reading,

𝒢. 𝒢.

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Hello! I’m 𝒢. 𝒢., a 20-something year old master student in Italy and aspiring archivist. Here I archive my life through writing about the mundane and collecting pieces of media. This post falls under my “Current Records” series, which includes my personal essays, journal entries and flâneries.

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