Investigating a Recurring Dream About Library Fines

Dreams, the wonder of libraries, and childhood memories

Simon Pitt
8 min readJan 4, 2021

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…

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Simon Pitt

Media techie, software person, and web-stuff doer. Head of Corporate Digital at BBC, but views my own. More at pittster.co.uk