Dreamt I was walking through a huge library built like a cathedral. Old books and parchments stacked in narrow aisles on all sides. I could hear the voices of some girls speaking softly from somewhere nearby, but I couldn't make out what they were saying.
I wandered through a section of medieval illuminated books filled with religious iconography and bound in stamped leather. Then through a tack and sail-themed section filled with rolled up nautical charts and schematic drawings of sailing ships and old pre-Dreadnought armored cruisers from a hundred twenty years ago.
Then I entered a section of globes and atlases - rolled up parchments bound with ribbon or leather. I chose one dark, heavy parchment and unrolled it, revealing an incomplete, hand-painted map of the world that could have come from Drake's time. Only the western coastlines of North and South America were sketched in, and in the wide blank space of the Pacific, the words "Terra Incognita," and a large coiled sea dragon.
Another table-sized chart with ragged edges showed a number of small circles widely spaced from each other and connected by faint lines, the way Victor airways connect distant VORTAC beacons on an aviation chart. Ringing each circle were a series of dots, each circle with a different number of dots of varying size. Next to some of the circles was a hand-printed word, but the parchment was very old and the words were smudged. I was able to read only two of them - the words Deneb and Centauri.
I woke up to the sound of thunder.
Posted by case at July 3, 2008 06:57 AM