Library of souls

I have a really cool writing app on my laptop called Poe. I really should use it.

Last night I dreamed that I went on a cemetery tour. Well, it did not really start out that way, I was walking along a dark path in a kind of wooded area next to a canal in a city. Kind of like where the homeless people would walk along to find a place to sleep in the bushes, it was one of those sketchy kind of trails.

After I walked for awhile it seemed I had a small group with me. There was a woman, she was really skinny with stringy, dark hair. She was sad, she wanted to tell someone her story, she wanted people to hear her.

The path eventually led into a cemetery. So many of my dreams are in cemeteries. Weird, I know, maybe it is the Goth in me. All of the graves were fairly new, it was the most recent part of the cemetery, and there were people of all ages buried there. There were people visiting, some were walking and others were driving slowly by on the gravel lanes with the two tire paths and grass in the middle.

We sort of hung back and did not interact much with the mourners, we were not there for that purpose. After awhile it felt like the coast was clear, and we all loaded up into a van and drove to the older part of the cemetery. We drove down a road and through a tunnel . . . the older part of the cemetery was completely isolated from the newer, modern part. The graves there were the same ones we had seen before in the new part, they'd been moved there to make room for the new graves. It seems like the plots in the new part were constantly being recycled. Only the newly deceased were buried there, and after a few weeks or months the caskets were moved to the old part of the cemetery. It was almost like a retail store that is constantly switching out its season merchandise on the front racks.




The people in the back part, the old part, were forgotten, old news,  the past. No one cares about the past. The woman with the dark, stringy hair took us there to show us how many people were there. There were countless rows and miles of plots, and though it was old it was beautiful. It was quaintly unkempt, there was tall grass in some places and the sun shining on the blades made them shine like gold. The stones were weathered and some of the inscriptions had long since worn away. It was a peaceful loneliness.

Next we were in a library, but it was not a library for books, it was a library of souls. It was a sort of museum library, and it was old, really old, historic. There were countless rooms, some large, some small, but all packed full. We went there at night, when the souls came out. We started in one room . . . started browsing . . . this is difficult to explain, but there were actual books, and each book contained a soul. The name of the person was on the cover of the book and when it was opened he or she could come out into the open, but only at night.

The woman, the skinny one with dark hair, wanted to introduce me, us, to a few people. I watched, amazed as these people came to life, literally straight from the pages. They did not say much, they were kind of confused. I couldn't tell if they knew we were there or not, that is still unclear.

We split up, we all went into different hallways and rooms. Soon there were souls everywhere, running amuck, so to speak. At one point someone from the outside world came to the building and was trying to get in. We were afraid we'd get in trouble for setting all the souls loose, so we hid inside mirrors.

As morning approached we began to get worried. The souls could not be outside of their books during the day, for some reason it was forbidden in much the same way that vampires cannot be touched by sunlight. The souls did not want to get back into the books, they wanted to stay out.

And that's when my blasted alarm went off . . . always at the good part.