I found myself walking into a long corridor. I was already in motion when I noticed it, as if I had joined the dream late and it had started without me. The floor was solid under my feet, but I couldn’t remember taking the first step. I was just… there, moving forward.
Paper was drifting through the air in slow spirals. Some pieces brushed my shoulder very lightly, like a breath or a small wind, and kept going. I tried to look at them as they passed. The drawings wouldn’t stay fixed. One second I saw what looked like a doorway made of spirals, then it shifted into a hand reaching toward something, then a face that felt familiar, and then the lines slid apart and turned into something else before I could place it.
The light in the corridor didn’t seem to come from lamps or windows. It leaked out of the walls in soft currents, almost like underwater light. When I walked, it felt like the brightness leaned and tilted with me, as if the whole hallway was paying attention and adjusting around my steps.
At some point the corridor stopped behaving like a corridor. It opened up without any clear transition, and suddenly I was walking inside a huge library. The shelves rose very high on either side of me but the edges blurred into mist. Some of the books looked solid for a moment and then faded, as if the idea of them was stronger than their form. There was a low humming sound in the background. It wasn’t loud, just steady, and I couldn’t tell if it came from the room or from inside my own chest.
Pages floated at about eye level, turning slowly in the air. One of them drifted toward me in a way that felt intentional, like it had chosen me. I reached out my hand. As soon as my fingers touched the paper, the symbols on it began to glow. They didn’t flare up; they deepened, like ink remembering it used to be light. For a moment the page felt warm, almost alive. I had the sense that I had seen this language somewhere before, maybe in another dream or in that in‑between place right before waking, but I couldn’t quite catch the meaning. As soon as I tried to focus on it, it slipped away.
The glow faded and the page cooled. It floated out of my hand and went back to drifting like the others, as if nothing special had happened. The humming felt a little closer after that, or maybe I was just more aware of it. When I took a step, the floor seemed to ripple very slightly under my feet—not enough to make me fall, just enough that I knew the place registered my movement. With a few more steps, the space slowly narrowed again. The shelves and mist pulled back into themselves until it felt like a corridor once more.
I kept walking. The pages kept drifting. I remember feeling that the dream itself was rearranging around me as I moved through it, like the story wasn’t fully written yet and was using my walking to find its shape. I woke up with the feeling that the page I touched “knew” me somehow, even though I never understood what was written on it.
This dream continues in “The Library of Almost”
(Stomari | Process & Drafts – version 3).
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