(10/7/08) starbucks bookshelf

(Entered in paper journal at 6:40 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

It was daytime. I stood before an apartment door, which was at the top of a staircase on what may have been an outdoor walkway. I was pressing a floor buzzer, hoping the woman (?) I was here to visit would let me in.

Two tall, wiry, Caribbean men (possibly with a lot of paint on their clothes) jostled in front of me and walked right in through the door, as if it had been unlocked all along. They left the door half-open. I could see them getting to work on some construction job. They might have looked at me every now and then, as if they wondered why I wasn't coming in. But I wasn't going to stay here if the woman wasn't here to let me in. Besides, I needed a quiet place to study.

I walked to a parking lot with a Starbucks. I thought the Starbucks would be a good place to study. But it didn't feel quite right. I felt like I should go to a different one, like I had made an appointment to meet someone at a different one. But it started raining, so I went into this one, anyway.

The Starbucks was big, but it had a pale, cheap feel to it, like a living room. I sat with a group of peple who all sat near or on a bed before a bookshelf. The bookshelf was about waist-high and backed against a short wall that stood before a dim, unlit kitchen.

My old friend R knelt before the bookshelf, looking at the books. There was one person in the group, a woman, perhaps slightly older than I, but very beautiful and very mature-looking, who seemed to be praising R for looking at the books. The books were used books that people had left here. You could either read the  books as you had coffee or take the books home with you, either for free or at a very small cost.

Seeing how the woman had praised R, I knelt down to see what books there were. I wondered if I might take anything home with me. But I really didn't want any of the books. I felt like I had enough books already. I pulled out a handful of books that interested me. Two were, I found, science fiction reworkings of fairy tales.

One of the books was a sci-fi reworking of the Snow White story. It was called something like The Snow Princess Must Be Saved or We Must Save the Snow Princess. On the cover was a painting of Jupiter.

There may have been two Shakespeare play, one of which was Measure for Measure (though it may have kept changing into Love's Labours Lost and All's Well That Ends Well).

Another book was very interesting. It was very small at first, maybe one and a half inches by three-quarters of an inch. It might have changed a few times. At first it was like a manga. Then it was more like a young adult science fiction novel. I put headphones on to listen to the book. As I listened, I laughed to R about how I thought the book was one thing, but how it turned out to be another thing.