The Library Man and the Game Show Host

From a dream that I had in June 2006:


There is a man in a luxurious estate style house. It is filled with heavy dark wood furniture and leather chairs and elaborately carved siding. I have a flashback in my dream of this man being kidnapped from the street at some point in the past and realize that he is here in this place possibly brainwashed and unaware that this isn’t where he belongs. He has forgotten his former life and has forgotten the kidnapping.

The man is wearing a bulky, clanging suit of armor that is made from metal things from around the house. I’m not sure that everything making up the armor is the type of thing that you’d find in kitchen cabinets, but most of the armor is made of kitchen pots, metal spoons, colanders, and other kitchen / household utensils. The man is always tripping clumsily over his suit of armor, and every time he trips, he falls to the ground landing on his back with his legs flying in the air like the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz. He laughs at himself, shakes his head, rolls his eyes, stands back up as he dusts himself off.

The man in the house is in a dark library whose dark wooden shelves are covered with books of every title known. This man is reading the titles as he dusts the books and the shelves with a feather duster. He hasn’t read any of these books but he tells himself that he will read them all eventually. The man is whistling a happy tune, dusting off the shelves, and tossing the feather duster in the air playfully from time to time as he finishes a shelf. He seems fully content to be doing what he is doing and doesn’t seem to harbor any bad feelings about his situation at all.

Now the view of the room grows smaller as a camera view widens and we see the room disappear behind a wall and a locked door. The view continues to move backwards through an arboretum filled with trees and flowers and shrubs. Another wall and another door now fill the scene and the camera pans over an audience and a game show host on a stage in front of the crowd.

The game show host says: “This is the moment that we’ve been waiting for weeks to see. Tonight we get to find out how this man will react when I let him know that there is more to his life than he can even imagine.”

The game show host opens the door to leading from the auditorium to the arboretum and walks across a narrow cobblestone path towards the locked door on the other side. In the dream the arboretum is extremely vivid. I’m in the game show host’s body as he walks across towards the locked door that leads to the library. There is mist in the air and I can smell the flowers. There are water striders skimming the surface of the water. I reach out and touch a soft, fuzzy leaf. I can feel the dew from the plants on the leg of my pants.

I’m an outside viewer again as I watch the host climb a set of stairs and approach the locked door to the library.

The host is immaculately dressed in a suit and a tie. His eyes have a glimmer to them.


When the host reaches the door, the camera closes in on his face. He smiles a gleaming game-show smile and winks at the audience before unlocking the door.

The host walks in to the dark library where the man is feather dusting the bookshelves. Immediately the man’s eyes grow wide and he falls over his armor, landing on the floor and chuckling awkwardly at himself, then stumbling up off the ground. He asks the host where he came from. The host tells the man that he came from the laboratory.

The man’s eyes get wide and he looks out the window at the arboretum and asks: “The laboratory, I didn’t know that there was a laboratory, where is the laboratory?”

The game show host says: “Just on the other side of the arboretum.”

The man looks longingly out the window past the trees and the pond and says: “The arboretum, ahhh… it must be nice out there, I see it every day but the door to the arboretum is locked and I can’t go out that way.”

The game show host responds: “It is nice out there, we’re doing some really amazing experiments in the lab, we’re learning the secrets of life, and living... how life works and about all of the intricacies of nature.”

The man looks longingly out the window towards the unlocked door on the other side of the arboretum. The game show host walks back out into the arboretum and locks the door to the library behind him, leaving the man in the library, still gazing out the window towards the open door on the other side. The game show host stands at the top of the stairway which leads to the library's locked door. The camera closes in on his face, as he looks at the camera with an earnest questioning expression. “What will this man do now that he knows that there is more to life than just dusting books? What will he do now that he knows that there is a place that he wants to go on the other side of that locked door? To find out the answer to that question and more, you’ll have to tune in next time. We'll be right back, after these messages."

And then I woke up.