I remember that someone had told me about this place. The memory of the voice is a broken glass chime in a distant wind—a melody that almost was. It wasn’t a conversation so much as a sudden, impossible knowing that settled in my marrow during one of the many fleeting encounters in my travels. I could no longer pin down the source. Was it the lady whose forearm was a topography of a healed map, a single, silvery scar winding from wrist to elbow? Or the old man whose face was a seamless canvas, mouthless, yet who spoke in a basso hum that vibrated the air inside my teeth? Perhaps it was one of the speaking creatures, those impossible geometries of bone and shadow that held our tongue as a borrowed, fluent thing. The specifics are lost, filed away in a cerebral folder marked ‘Too Strange to Retain.’

In any case, here I am today.

I stand within a structure that defies architectural language. It is a large stone castle, but the stone is the color of solidified twilight, and the shelves are not built but grown. They tower well beyond the reach of my neck, twisting into a gothic spire that scrapes against the ceiling—a ceiling that is not plaster or wood, but a deep, pressurized indigo speckled with what look like glowing insects. They are not insects, of course. They are pinpricks of pure, captured luminescence, a soft, warm glow best compared to the afterimage of a half-moon. It’s enough light to see the shapes of things around me, to witness the vastness, but nowhere near enough to spoil the grand, beautiful secrecy.

The shelves themselves stretch from a nonexistent edge to an equally non-existent edge. The books are not bound in paper and glue. They are bound in feeling. They are color-coded, yes, but the labels are more like emotional forecasts than categories. “Young Passions” are all the urgent, unripe shades of pink—a blushing salmon to a furious magenta. “Breathless Furies” are reds that burn without heat, ranging from a dry, desert ochre to a wet, arterial scarlet. And “Melancholy” seems to be a subtle, toxic blend between blue and green, the color of a deep-sea injury. There is also a section for “Lost Threads,” where books range anywhere from the quiet, exhausted brown of spent earth to a dull, humming gray, the color of a forgotten name.

I have no idea what these plaques are supposed to represent in the grand taxonomy of everything they hold, but I know now that I am in the Library of Forgotten Dreams, and I can assume that these books are nothing but the recorded, archived, and curated debris of the human subconscious. Whose dreams though? I wonder. The question hangs in the air, a breath that doesn’t fog. Maybe I need to pick one up and see inside!

The act feels like a profound violation, a psychic trespass. What if it is someone’s most private ruin, and I am just an intruder, a careless tourist in a landscape where I have no rights, no claims? But my curiosity is a hot wire stretched taut in my gut. To be somewhat safe, I choose a book from the “Breathless Furies” shelf, calculating that a book about rage or nightmares will be less intimate, less fundamentally me, than one of the pink or blue volumes.

The title, etched in a strange, shimmering script that shifts between languages, reads: “Enraged Blades.” Talk of dramatic, I guess. The cover is a soft leather material that somehow feels not merely moist, but recently moist—a warm, clammy film of past sensation. The pages inside are coarse, like dry, scarred skin, and the letters are foreign looking, yet perfectly readable by the mind. As I begin to read, the library seems to invert around me. I don’t just read the dream; I am folded into its skin.

I am transported to a memory I had long since cauterized and discarded. I realise why the story feels so familiar: it was the nightmare, the one that had left a phantom ache in my joints for days. The exhilarating and frightening feeling of being a monster, a sudden, grotesque shift in scale and purpose. My hands are now sharp, long claws, and I stand in the middle of a mostly empty street, the air vibrating with a sun I cannot feel. It is a bright, hot summer day, and the asphalt feels especially hot, but my feet, covered in hard, unfeeling scales, register only a slight, dull warmth. The sounds coming from my throat, that unimaginably hoarse, resonating roar, is the sound of all suppressed things being let loose, and the scattering people all around are mere objects in its wake.

I remember picking up that poor person. I thought it was random at the time, but as I re-read the moment, I feel the compulsion again. It was necessary. It felt strangely relieving when my talons, with their black, glassy sheen, dug into his flesh. One after the other, slowly but deliberately, the sharp points pierced between his ribs, tearing up everything in their path. The book describes the mechanics of bone splintering and tissue giving way with a detached, clinical precision that makes me nauseous and calm all at once. Finally, I had decided it was enough, the balance of my interior scale had been tipped. I began pulling my hands apart. The last scream from his mouth—a brief, high-pitched, dissolving sound—before his body tore into two pieces had felt, how should I put it, relentlessly relaxing. I had done what I had come to do.

I closed the book with a violent start, tearing myself free from the narrative. The cover was covered in what appeared to be splashes of wet, crimson blood, and the moist feeling under my fingers intensified into the clammy, warm slick of fresh bodily fluid. Almost frantically I put the book back where I had picked it from. That’s when I realized that I had been holding my breath, trapping the metallic tang of the dream in my chest. It sure was a nightmare, a forgotten, magnificent horror, recorded here, waiting for me to relive.

The memory, though, was too vivid, too real to be fiction. As I caught my breath, I saw that the cover of the book had gone back to its original state, the blood splatters dissolved into the leather, the warm moisture of fresh blood replaced by the cool, clammy film. The book had reset itself, ready to be read, and forgotten, again.

These were all my own dreams. I had seen them, forgotten them, and they had taken refuge here. There were certainly a great, frightening number of them throughout my life. I decided to see another one, a necessary counterpoint. I headed deeper into the immense chamber. In the distance, at the library’s heart, I saw a sharp glow. There was something there, something of impossible importance, an epicenter of quiet power. But I was too raw after the last book. I had to find something to rinse the nightmares from my soul and get my nerves to calm down before I investigated what it was.

I picked up a little navy colored volume from the “Young Passions” shelf. There were streaks of lavender and silver crisscrossing the satin cover, which felt cool to the touch, like a smooth, perfectly round river stone. It promised an easy read, a gentle immersion. The title read “Sitis Animae”. I am not good with Latin to begin with, but this felt straightforward. 

I opened it, and was surprised at how soft the pages were, as if they were someone’s supple skin, too perfect to be real, yet utterly genuine. The sense of being transported came next. This time, it was a dark, profound starry night, the sky the deepest shade of navy, punctured by hundreds of perfect, indifferent stars. There was a small pit nearby, filled with the last embers of a fire recently snuffed—a few orange teeth in the blackness. A little bottle of some strange, luminous liquor sat nearby, reflecting the starlight. Then there was her, the light in the dark, below me, her soft skin rubbed against my bare chest, a slow, perfect friction. Other senses soon picked up: I heard her ragged breathing, a sound of pure focus, and felt my own deliberate, rising thrusts. She had her eyes open, reflecting the starry blanket above in miniature, creating a world within a world. It was surreal, transcendent. The impending release felt like a mirage on the horizon, but we both knew, with the certainty of a physical law, that we would catch up to it.

The shooting star could very well have been the trigger, the explosive sound of our mutual climax. I don’t know what she wished for, or if she even wished for anything at all. All I knew was that I was seeing something that was never going to happen again, the final, white-hot passage of the shooting star reflected in my lover’s eyes as we rode the waves of exhilaration into the silence.

I felt like I could read this book over and over again a hundred times, and still not tire from the same, perfect thing repeating over and over again. And while the thirst for it to happen in reality would never be quenched in my lifetime, knowing that I had desired something so surreal, so beautiful, so raw was a consolation I could keep close to my heart. It was a secret victory. But for now, I had bigger things to find out.

I placed the book back in its place, my body humming with a light, giddy energy. I turned back to where the golden glow had been steadily building. I headed to it, moving faster than before. It was right at the center of the hall, the quiet eye of the emotional storm. A pedestal stood at the convergence of the massive, spiraling shelves. I stood before it, and the glow did not seem to come from a single book that was there, but from one that wasn’t. The light seemed to be formed from a negative space, a shimmering, golden hollow where a book should have been. It was the absolute zero of light and mass. Could it be?

I knew, suddenly and irrevocably, that this was the elusive dream. The one that almost materialized right before the final moment before waking, a dream that my mortal mind was not allowed to fully see. The dream that I am forced, every day, to forget even before I have fully conceived it, a merciful erasure. Maybe it had to be this way. This book, silent, immaterial, an anchor of pure absence, must be the one holding together every other dream in this library. 

Without it, all others would fall apart, their light extinguished, their memory lost forever. I know this with the certainty of a religious truth. How do I know this? Because I was told about this place. I was told that I could learn the mystery of the unseen dream, but that the cost would be a great one, a burden on my soul. This was it, the unseen dream, and now, finally, I know the cost. The cost is the knowing itself. I will spend the rest of my chosen life knowing the shape of the life I could not live, and that shadow will make everything else unbearably real.