Professor Xavier's Institute for Gifted Youngsters.
I forgot my keys three days in a row. Usually I can take such synchronicities to mean that I'm doing something wrong, but this time (as I've been doing everything perfectly, these days, with the exception of locking myself out of my house) I couldn't imagine what it could have been.
Last night, in my dream, I was in an ancient and crumbling bookshop in Amsterdam. Amidst the impossibly old books, all faded to white, there was a machine, bellows and pipes and a brass typewriter. I was typing the password, when the keyboard fractured and the letters scattered. A frequent frustration in my dreams is my desperation to prove that I can, in fact, read there. When I was only knowing the words the keyboard was correct; when I followed the letters I had to hunt them down, spelling them out one at a time. I A M T R I C K Y. The machine opened up, and the leap, which seemed dangerous, became a mossy cocoon once I was over the ledge. Then - and trust me, I considered omitting this - Storm and Beast appeared to me as gods. Marvel isn't even my preferred universe, but I'll assume that my subconscious knows something I don't. This subterranean secret garden they showed me was a place of hope, a place for research: there were books, and instruments, and a green house, and the green house was curved and lovely but so scientific that I wondered if I'd be allowed to bring a bit of art to it. In the garden I found a bookshelf containing all of my first magic books, the ones I had when I was fourteen. And they seemed like such tender objects: the derision I usually hold for the entirety of my past was gone. I realised that the shelf would not hold these books for anyone else, that it would manifest something different and important for everyone. My father was there, then, and I tried to show him, but he couldn't read them. I explained that they were fading for him, reading the way that books do in dreams for him, because he was dead.
I usually assume that my frustration with my ability to read in dreams is a sort of joke: my brain trying to find its way around it, trying to make sense of it. But it seems now that the problem I felt was that knowledge I have in one world may not work, may not be accessible in another: that my insistence upon the words and letters of this place could slow my acceptance of the available, intuitive truths of another.
Last night, in my dream, I was in an ancient and crumbling bookshop in Amsterdam. Amidst the impossibly old books, all faded to white, there was a machine, bellows and pipes and a brass typewriter. I was typing the password, when the keyboard fractured and the letters scattered. A frequent frustration in my dreams is my desperation to prove that I can, in fact, read there. When I was only knowing the words the keyboard was correct; when I followed the letters I had to hunt them down, spelling them out one at a time. I A M T R I C K Y. The machine opened up, and the leap, which seemed dangerous, became a mossy cocoon once I was over the ledge. Then - and trust me, I considered omitting this - Storm and Beast appeared to me as gods. Marvel isn't even my preferred universe, but I'll assume that my subconscious knows something I don't. This subterranean secret garden they showed me was a place of hope, a place for research: there were books, and instruments, and a green house, and the green house was curved and lovely but so scientific that I wondered if I'd be allowed to bring a bit of art to it. In the garden I found a bookshelf containing all of my first magic books, the ones I had when I was fourteen. And they seemed like such tender objects: the derision I usually hold for the entirety of my past was gone. I realised that the shelf would not hold these books for anyone else, that it would manifest something different and important for everyone. My father was there, then, and I tried to show him, but he couldn't read them. I explained that they were fading for him, reading the way that books do in dreams for him, because he was dead.
I usually assume that my frustration with my ability to read in dreams is a sort of joke: my brain trying to find its way around it, trying to make sense of it. But it seems now that the problem I felt was that knowledge I have in one world may not work, may not be accessible in another: that my insistence upon the words and letters of this place could slow my acceptance of the available, intuitive truths of another.