Secret Passageway to a Bookstore

 It seems that there are recurring themes in my dreams about types of places, such as amusement parks, offices, priate homes, airports, shopping malls (I guess that says something about our over-consumptive society) and, ah yes, bookstores. I've always loved bookstores and libraries, so it probably comes as no surprise that I'd be visiting bookstores in my dreams. Here's a recent dream that is kind of neat...

In this dream, I had bought a historic  townhouse wuth classic architectural detais in an urban part of a city, maybe on the East coast. After moving into the townhouse, I was strolling through the front foyer in the evening when I noticed light coming from a small recessed space above the coat closet door, shaped like a half-moon.  I couldn't figure out where that light could have come from as that was an exterior wall and it was night. I got a stepladder and climbed up to investigate. It turns out to be a short passageway (and so low you have to crawl through it), leading to the interior space of a townhouse on the other side of my townhouse.

But this wasn't a residental townhouse -- it was a bookstore. What I was looking at was a rather large, high-ceiling room filled with wall-to-wall bookcases. Filling the middle of the room were several large cylindrical bookcases. Some of these bookcases were tall so they had rolling stairs. Though the stairs for wall shelves are the usual upright kind, the stairs for these cylindrical shelves have a weird design. The stairs go sideways, curving around a section of the bookcase. How did I manage to buy a townhouse and not noice it was next to a bookstore? Did the previous owner know about this passageway? Maybe he made it?

Apparently, it was after hours because I did not see any customers, But I did see a thirty-something man wearing an apron to mark him as a worker, going around to tidy things up and straighten rows of books. After a minute, he looked up and spotted me peeking down at him from the passageway. With a stern look, he quickly removed a rolling staircase from the bookcase directly below me, as if he thought I'd come out in here and steal books.

"The store is closed," he said.

 Though it wasn't my intention to steal anything, I did look longinly at all these books.  The dream ended there.