(no subject)
Was hoping this wouldn't turn in to some damp-cloth, sentimental dream journal, but a portion of last night's dream was so interesting that it deserves committing to memory. It appears that my dreams have points they wish to make clear and I'd be doing them a disservice if I made the mistake of forgetting them.
By hook or by crook, I ended up in a library. It seemed a very homely sort of library, filled with assistants and clerks who were happy to help people with their inquiries. From the clothing and speech of the people around me, I came to believe I was in 1970's New York - everything was somewhere in between The Warriors and Sesame Street. The folks running the library had also been clever enough to hire groups of extremely tall men as orderlies to help shorter people get books off the higher shelves - one such gentle giant even helped me with a search of my own, though I cannot remember the book I sought. As such, I felt very much at ease and was at leisure to wonder the library undisturbed.
One section of the library intrigued me. As with most libraries, a rack of smaller bookshelves ran across the dead middle of the hall, whilst the walls were flanked with taller shelves. However, suspended in the aisles between the two sets of shelves was something akin to a washing line, covered in thousands upon thousands of paper tags. Upon further inspection, each of the tags bore the name of a human being. I found that after a bit of practice, I could lift myself from the floor using this line, and guide myself around the room by shimmying along the aisles.
After a short while, I discovered that the names on the tags belonged to different groups, and each section of this line was accompanied by a different load of books for the purposes of historical research, politics, genealogy etc. It turned out that the first section of the line was made up of the names of black slaves who had died during the Middle Passage, so that black people curious as to their history could trace their bloodlines back to the slave trade and beyond. The second part of the line contained the names of Jews murdered during the Holocaust, and was also supervised by a group of kindly-looking Jewish men sat behind old computers, who informed me that if a Jewish person was interested as to their heritage, or were hunting down a grandparent who was suspected to have been killed by the Nazis, they could not only check with Polish, German etc. authorities for the correct records, but could also help them follow their ancestry back to the days of Moses. The third and final part of the line was reserved for a kind of "anyone else" category, stretching from Anglo-Saxons to Russians and Far-Eastern Asians.
It pleased me hugely that somebody had set up such a room, and with such humane intent. I felt that this place embodied something very gratifying about the common human spirit - a building of learning which not only hired tall people to help you get stuff of the shelves, but also had one place in particular devoted to helping individuals discover their past and help peoples gain closure with the atrocities done to them in the past. All in all, a puzzling but nevertheless pleasing dream.
By hook or by crook, I ended up in a library. It seemed a very homely sort of library, filled with assistants and clerks who were happy to help people with their inquiries. From the clothing and speech of the people around me, I came to believe I was in 1970's New York - everything was somewhere in between The Warriors and Sesame Street. The folks running the library had also been clever enough to hire groups of extremely tall men as orderlies to help shorter people get books off the higher shelves - one such gentle giant even helped me with a search of my own, though I cannot remember the book I sought. As such, I felt very much at ease and was at leisure to wonder the library undisturbed.
One section of the library intrigued me. As with most libraries, a rack of smaller bookshelves ran across the dead middle of the hall, whilst the walls were flanked with taller shelves. However, suspended in the aisles between the two sets of shelves was something akin to a washing line, covered in thousands upon thousands of paper tags. Upon further inspection, each of the tags bore the name of a human being. I found that after a bit of practice, I could lift myself from the floor using this line, and guide myself around the room by shimmying along the aisles.
After a short while, I discovered that the names on the tags belonged to different groups, and each section of this line was accompanied by a different load of books for the purposes of historical research, politics, genealogy etc. It turned out that the first section of the line was made up of the names of black slaves who had died during the Middle Passage, so that black people curious as to their history could trace their bloodlines back to the slave trade and beyond. The second part of the line contained the names of Jews murdered during the Holocaust, and was also supervised by a group of kindly-looking Jewish men sat behind old computers, who informed me that if a Jewish person was interested as to their heritage, or were hunting down a grandparent who was suspected to have been killed by the Nazis, they could not only check with Polish, German etc. authorities for the correct records, but could also help them follow their ancestry back to the days of Moses. The third and final part of the line was reserved for a kind of "anyone else" category, stretching from Anglo-Saxons to Russians and Far-Eastern Asians.
It pleased me hugely that somebody had set up such a room, and with such humane intent. I felt that this place embodied something very gratifying about the common human spirit - a building of learning which not only hired tall people to help you get stuff of the shelves, but also had one place in particular devoted to helping individuals discover their past and help peoples gain closure with the atrocities done to them in the past. All in all, a puzzling but nevertheless pleasing dream.