It always made the dream duller, she thought, when she walked through it aware that she was dreaming. Because of that awareness she knew this was a dream she had often, and one of the more frustrating repetitions because it never seemed to come to fruition. The library halls seemed endless, the volumes surrounding her familiar from the waking world and overwhelming for the immortality of the words within.
There was a novel within her. For years she had made notes, kept a blank book beside her bed for midnight inspirations and scribbled lines on scraps of paper whenever and wherever they struck her. Through a multitude of dead-end jobs she had built up a folder of notes and fragmentary scenes, the scattered makings of the great work within her head. A part of her hoped that the messy folder would someday reach a critical mass, that the novel would somehow spring from those scraps of paper, suddenly a puzzle needing only to be pieced together into a glorious work that would echo down the ages. Already written, her work would only need a few weekends to polish into something to be sent to editors. They would marvel at the elegance of her prose, publishers would make competing offers, and her success would be assured. Someday her book would have a place on these shelves, beside the classics treasured for immeasurable time.
These were her daydreams, the path her mind took when the hours of her job were long and she needed distraction from the depressing thought of small pay. In her waking dreams, the book was already written and she rode the joy of its completion. In these uncontrollable night wanderings, she walked endless aisles of books, and never once found hers there. Bitterly she vowed to someday sit down, collect her thoughts and make herself write the thing the hard way. Even more bitterly she chided herself for procrastination without end. Everyone walks the world thinking they have a great novel inside them, to the point where the phrase was a cliché. Like so many others, she would go through a humdrum life never living up to the vow to make herself write it all out. If everyone who meant to write a great novel actually followed through on that dream, then the libraries in the real world would truly be as endless as the one in this oft-visited dream. In frustration and anguish she ran a hand along the rows of books, with a sense of half-touch and surreality that marked this as a dream. The textures of the spines beneath her fingers had an incorporeal feel. At random she pulled out a book, and read the title without any expectation it would register except as something she had read and been in awe of.
The title read ‘The Greatest American Novel I Wrote In My Head Every Day On The Bus To Work For Twelve Years’.
The stuff of dreams was not meant to register so clearly in the mind, and it made her pause. The author’s name was unfamiliar and unremarkable. Scanning the shelf, she saw other titles ranging from long clumsy sentences like that of the book she had pulled, to overwrought pseudo-poetic phrases. Not one of the author’s names was familiar.
Struggling hard to suppress a sense of growing excitement, she moved slowly along the shelf, scanning author names and barely registering them until one leapt out at her. Had she needed to breathe, in a dream, she would have been holding her breath. There is a rule to dreams, she knew, that one must tread gently as an observer to continue the dream. Sudden bursts of emotional reaction tended to leave one awake and bewildered, clutching at half-remembered images good or bad. She knew also that the architecture of a dream may be malleable, shaped by subtle will, and so as she sat down beside the shelf her notebook was quietly there upon her knee, the pen ready and waiting full of ink.
Almost lethargically she opened to the first page, all active thought clamped down into silence. The book on one knee, notebook on the other, she began to copy her own words.
It was a work of beauty, elegantly phrased but not so much that it distracted from the underlying themes. At times she had to struggle not to be swept along emotionally by how beautifully her ideas came together in scenes that left one breathless for their poetry of meaning. Time did not exist, her hand never cramped, there was only the novel, her novel, the words flowing seamlessly in through her eyes and out again through the pen in her hand. The notebook inexplicably held it all, and when at last the pages ended in an orchestrated moment of sublime beauty, she let the book fall and clutched the notebook, carefully turning it back to the very first page.

Still driven with a sense of purpose, she woke. Moving slowly, eyes all but closed to preserve that sacred middle ground of the waking dream, she reached for the bedside notebook and languorously put the pen to paper. From somewhere outside, a raven’s raucous cry joined the chorus of morning songbirds, and the spell was broken. Like sunlight on water the memory of words fragmented and scattered. The nature of the dream was not lost, but the contents of the pages escaped the clutch of her mind. The effort of the night seemed very real, and the loss and exhaustion washed over her. The page was dry and empty.
In resignation she rose, dragging the old folder of notes down with her to coffee. The contents were a mess, sentence fragments that had seemed vital to record, sketches of scenes without order. Slogging through the scraps was a daunting task, but- a line scribbled on the back of a receipt caught at her. There was coffee, and an open notebook. With a sigh she picked up the pen and began to write.
In a library beyond the reach of waking minds, a volume was pulled for re-shelving from the section of might-have-been to will-be.