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Investigating a Recurring Dream About Library Fines
Dreams, the wonder of libraries, and childhood memories
I have a recurring dream. I borrow a pile of books from the library and spread them around my house: bedroom, living room, kitchen. Suddenly, I discover they were due back a week ago. I try to gather them up, but I can’t find them all and the 20p fines are amassing. I will go bankrupt. Why on earth did I ever scatter these books so far and wide?
A friend of mine is ecstatic about this dream. It is an anxiety dream, she tells me, with altogether a little too much glee. During our waking hours, she is more anxious than me, and so it is a relief for her to discover that underneath I am a bundle of nerves and neuroses like everyone else. A calm swan on the surface, but below, legs paddling like mad, grasping for library books.
Childhood memories are always tastes and smells and textures; your senses are so sensitive that everything takes on extra resonance. The library I went to as a child had a particular smell: old books, carpet, a dusty musk. By the doors was a high-pitched ringing generated by the book-theft detection system. I know now it was about 21,000hz, beyond the range of normal hearing, but my childish ears, undamaged by decades of noise, could hear it. Inside, the whine was drowned out by the rhythmic beeping of librarians scanning books and thumping ink-dated stamps on inside covers.
On the way in, a small mechanical device clicked when you went past. I was fascinated. Sometimes I would wave my hand in front of it, listening to it click as my hand blocked the invisible rays. I used to see how small a motion I could make to generate a click. Later I discovered it was counting people entering the library, and worried playing with it had artificially inflated the council statistics and I would get in trouble. Now, I suspect, librarians would be grateful for my efforts.
The library in my home town was nothing special. But it was my library. As a child, you experience things differently. My mum came to the library with me, but she couldn’t hear the high pitched noise. She wasn’t fascinated by the clicker, and she never crawled on the floor on her hands and knees and so doesn’t know about the prickly carpet. She was too big to fit in the…
