Cats, Books, and Dreams

Yesterday was a vet day:  I loaded both cats into carriers and drove them to the vet's for their vaccinations.  The theory was if they were both going at the same time, they'd keep each other calm.  Based on the syncopated caterwauling, I'd say it was a bogus theory.  

The cats eventually forgave me for stuffing them into cages and taking them to That Awful Place -- Smokey was over it about ninety minutes after we got home; but Cicero held out all afternoon and refused to come into the house, even when it was hailing.  To be fair, he had hidden under our bed when he heard Smokey wailing from his cage, but I had coaxed him out and then immediately thrust him into a small loaner carrier.  

That evening, I read the synopsis of Dion Fortune's contribution to Neo-Paganism in Ronald Hutton's "Triumph of the Moon," as a kind of counter-balance to some other readings.

So, naturally, I dreamed...

I was on an island research center.  The island was rocky and temperate -- there were fir trees instead of a jungle, and it wasn't icy.  A group of us entered the center, which was blocky and reminiscent of classical architecture.  The more I think about it, the more I am realizing that it was based on the architecture of the Lighthouse of Alexandria.

There was something about riding an elevator, which, paradoxically, seemed to be lowering (there was some sort of shuttling motion in the rafters of the elevator car as if a cable was being unwound), but we travelled up to one of the upper floors.  There was also something about entering a defunct part of a library -- in my dream's eye, I saw a floor schematic of the complex, and we entered a greyed out portion.  This had been under the prevue of an unnamed country, but they had withdrawn from the research center for reasons that were never revealed in the dream. 

Somewhere around here in the dream, Cicero was with me.  We were in a kind of card catalog hall, with lots of shelves of unread books.  The room was large and airy, but dim, as if only every third light worked.  Leaning up against a shelf was a pile of books which included Dion Fortune's "Moon Magic," "The Sea Priestess," some other books of her fiction, and some sort of book on antiquities that belonged to my parents (their names were written on the inside cover of the book.  The sense was that since this section of the research center was closed, if we wanted to, we could take some of the books.  I wanted some of the books I saw, especially the one that had been my parents' -- in the dream I supposed that the book had been left behind when they left the Mangla Dam Project, but I couldn't figure out how it had ended up in a foreign government's library.  I had a sense that this was my, or at least my family's, book, and that I had every right to it.

The ownership of the books didn't resolve, and the group left the library.  There was something here about going down a level or two to a kind of utility or engineering floor filled with lots of unused machinery.  At this point, Cicero got away from me (he'd been good up until then) and I had to coax him out from between collections of shelved tools and conduit that he'd crawled into.

There was probably more to the dream, but that's all I recall.  What strikes me about this dream is that it could have turned into an elevator anxiety dream, but didn't; it could have turned into a lost in a twisty, constricted place, but it didn't; and that it was set in a conflation of the Lighthouse of Alexandria and the Library of Alexandria.