Indiana Jones meets Antiques Roadshow..

My dreams are very Alice-like of late.

In one, I was in the spare bedroom at my grandmother's house, long ago torn down. There was always a curtained closet in that bedroom which, when I was a kid, held all manner of my grandmother's cool 70's polyester and chiffon dresses, frilly nightgowns, and colorful robes she used to let me and my sister play dress-up in. The back bedroom was one of my my favorite places in the house, where she kept her ginormous collection of costume jewelry and all her makeup, and I would play in there for hours. After she had died, and my cousins had moved into her house, and remodeled, they wound up, for whatever reason, drywalling over that closet and creating a new, larger one in another corner. Since I babysat for them alot since they were next door to my parents' house, I was always a little weirded out by that phantom closet that was tehre but not there, not because the house was haunted or anything, but just because I'm always a little spooked by things like that, the forgotten things behind other things, that which is lost and walled over. (For example in the basement at Myopic books, since the street was built up around the turn of the century, there is actually a storefront window and doorway looking into nothingness, which unnerved me endless when I had to read down there before they moved the events to the second floor.)

Anyway, in the dream, the closet apparently, though on a different wall, held all sorts of lovelies..old dresses and coats, and behind it, a secret endless passage way lined with shelves filled with depression glass, and costume jewelry, and old purses and suitcases, and enough ephemera and collageable goodies to set me up for years..all of them pristine and untouched as far as the eye could see.(As you can see, I've been prowling thriftstores far too much..and yes, I often dream of vintage housewares.)Just when I'd found yet another anteroom filled with old steamer trunks overflowing with gorgeous stuff, I turned to find on a low ledge some sort of fiendish idol wrapped in a greasy towel, and thus, after a bit of discussion, we determined that the closet was, in fact the gate to hell. (Who knew it would be paved with pyrex?) Of course, this discovery was followed an mad, Indiana Jones-ish dash to get out of there before the closet closed door on us forever, some people eaten by the idols which had comes to life, and were chasing us (they looked not unlike that freaky little trilogy of terror monster)--at the point of which I woke up.

This morning, I dreamed that at work, there was this secret storage area of stacks that one had to get through by diving into box of those small little golf pencils (empty, but only about 5 by 5 inches). Apparently if you placed the box on the closet shelf correctly, you could just dive into it head first and it would expand to accomodate you. Though, in the dream, I had apparently been doing this for awhile, I was suddenly convinced it would be impossible to get through it, and when I remarked this to a co-worker, she pulled out the back of the closet where the pencils were, and showed me a 12x12 whole into the space that she used to get to it (er..instead of the pencil box.) This made perfect sense to me in the dream, but we were surprised that we could see other people in this secret room, apparently sitting at tables and studying, but we didn't know how they had gotten in.

Of course this dream followed one in which I was riding the red line (which I rarely do anymore)and they had remodeled the station and I could not for the live of me find the southbound trains. First I wound up in what I can only decribe as a seventies waiting room with green walls and brown chairs, with a window that looked onto the correct tracks, but no where to catch the train. Then, I followed a bunch of people down a stairway into this weird underground world that reminded me of Navy Pier, only underground, with boat rides and foodstands and balloon vendors, and still nowhere could I find the train I needed to take..When I found another stairway, I asked a woman who was decending where the train was and she yelled at me in another language, then stabbed me, with a finger, clean thru my side, drawing blood. I assume the pain was what woke me up.