"The Library Between Dreams"

I first found the library on a night when I couldn’t sleep.

My mind had been restless all evening — racing thoughts, half-formed memories, a strange heaviness that kept me tossing in bed. Around three in the morning, I gave up on trying to force sleep and just let my eyes close. And that’s when I heard it: the faint creak of a door opening somewhere in the darkness of my mind.

When I opened my eyes again, I wasn’t in my bedroom anymore.

I stood barefoot on a floor that felt like polished wood, though it shimmered faintly, as though it reflected starlight. Before me stretched row after row of bookshelves, taller than any I had ever seen, rising into a ceiling lost in mist. The air smelled of rain-soaked paper and something sweet, like old dreams remembered.

At first, I thought it was a dream — a strangely vivid one. But then I noticed the details: the spines of the books, each embossed in a language I almost recognized. Some looked like English, but the words shifted when I tried to read them, like watching ink rearrange itself.

“Hello?” I called.

My voice echoed softly down the aisles, as though the shelves themselves were listening. Somewhere far away, I heard the faint scrape of a chair being pushed back, and then footsteps.

A woman appeared at the end of the aisle. She was dressed in something between a scholar’s robe and a nightgown, and her hair fell like a curtain of silver down her back. She smiled as if she had been expecting me.

“You finally made it,” she said.

I stared. “Where am I?”

“You’re in the Library,” she said simply, as though that explained everything.

“The library?” I repeated.

She nodded. “The Library Between Dreams. You’ve walked past its doors many nights, but tonight you decided to step through.”

“I didn’t decide anything,” I said. “I was just… lying in bed.”

“That’s usually how it happens,” she said, as if that too were an answer.

I followed her down the aisle. The books whispered as we passed, the sound of pages turning though no one touched them. Some of them glowed softly, and others seemed to shiver like they were alive.

“What are these?” I asked, reaching out toward a shelf.

“Your dreams,” she said. “Your memories, too. And a few things that have yet to happen.”

I froze, my hand hovering near a thick red book. “You mean… the future?”

She smiled faintly. “Some futures. The ones that matter enough to leave a trace.”

I didn’t know why, but my chest tightened at that. I wanted to open the book, to see what was written inside.

“You can read it,” she said, as though she could sense my thought. “But be warned — once you know, you cannot unknow.”

I hesitated. My life hadn’t been perfect, but it hadn’t been unbearable either. Still, there were so many things I didn’t understand about myself — choices I made, fears I carried without reason. Maybe one of these books could explain me to myself.

My hand closed on the red book.

The woman said nothing as I opened it.

The pages were filled with scenes from my childhood — my first steps, the day I broke my arm, the summer my father left. But there were things I didn’t remember too: moments between moments, conversations I had never overheard, truths that had been hidden from me.

And then I turned to a page that hadn’t been written yet.

It showed me sitting in a hospital waiting room, my hands shaking. Someone I loved — though I couldn’t see who — was behind a door, fighting for their life. I flipped forward and saw myself years older, standing at a train station with a packed bag, about to leave everything behind. I saw tears on my own face — and then, abruptly, the pages went blank.

“Why does it stop?” I asked.

“Because you haven’t dreamed past that point yet,” the woman said. “The rest is still yours to write.”

I shut the book, my hands trembling. “Why show me this at all? Why me?”

She placed a hand on the book’s cover and gently slid it back into place.

“Everyone comes here sooner or later,” she said. “Some stay. Some only visit once. But the Library doesn’t open for just anyone. It opens for those who are ready to remember — or ready to choose.”

“Choose what?”

“How the next chapter begins,” she said softly.

The shelves around us seemed to hum. Somewhere far away, a bell rang — deep, resonant, final.

“It’s time to wake up,” she said.

I wanted to protest, to ask more questions, but the world was already fading. The shelves dissolved into mist, the floor vanished beneath my feet, and I gasped awake in my own bed.

It was morning.

For a long time, I just lay there, staring at the ceiling. I could still smell the faint trace of rain-soaked paper.

I don’t know if I’ll ever find the Library again. But sometimes, when I close my eyes at night, I hear the whisper of pages turning — and I know that somewhere, between one dream and the next, my story is still being written.