Here's a dream I can't interpret.

I was visiting Powell's Books in Portland, a store I have shopped in for many years, and discovered they had reorganized the whole place. I couldn't find a damn thing. The staff kept telling me their new shelving system wasn't that complicated and I would figure it out shortly, but I kept looking and looking for the books I wanted and getting totally lost. It was extremely frustrating. I did ask for help from the store's employees several times, but nothing they told me helped me figure out the new layout. It was mazelike, labyrinthine, everything seemed the same.

I never did find the books I wanted. I've also never had a dream quite like that one.

Anyone have any thoughts?

The time I remember dreaming about a bookcase, it represented literally, book knowledge. It happened to have been the worst nightmare of my life. A dark woman was eating people's brains and coming for me next. I climbed up on the bookshelf to hide. She found me, but I lucid dreamed and took the oar away. She was trying to knock me down. I realized at that time that the shadow self was going to take a more emotional approach. "Books" were not going to help me escape. It related to other levels personally, too.

Do you recall what books you were looking for?

edit: It took me a LONG time before I could tell this dream. It was devastating telling to a therapist I happened to be seeing at the time. I found it unconscionable that my mind would conceive of brain eating!

My guess is that the changed bookstore is a metaphor for the changed environment (e.g. failed economy; lost jobs; lost investments; end of Bush error; beginning of the Obama administration) we are now in. You will soon figure it out and adjust.

Like school-days dreams: hadn't studied for the test, or hadn't dressed for school!

I was going through a dilemma and cried myself to sleep while asking for guidance. I dreamed of standing in a totally white void when a Gandhi-like man appeared and it seemed he was pantomiming busywork, like arranging things, putting things away, literally climbing invisible ladders to take things down, laying stuff on a table I couldn't see. He finally noticed me and knew me, and said something like, "Oh, you finally made it here," or "What are you doing here?" I think it was both. I told him that all I want is well-being and he looked at me and said, "You have to Be Well first." It was a frustrating no answer to me. Then it dawned on me that I have to be okay with myself first before attempting to solve the problem. Suddenly all kinds of books appeared in the space as far and as high as I could see. The dream was a life saver because I took a chance and picked the simplest solution, thought it created a serious dent in our money situation. But the monetary problem did not last and being well spiritually is everlasting.

So I'm wondering if you are really facing something that is complicated and being given advice in the dream that the solution is simpler than you think?

A familiar place, maybe a place that felt especially nice and safe, is radically changed without warning. The old system no longer works and the new is so radically different from before you can't figure it out. You are seeking knowledge but can't access the new system just yet. Did the employees speak normally to you using a language you knew and you just couldn't use the information or did they speak gobbledygook? I ask because I belive we are shifting dimensions or more properly we are beginning to access levels of reality former closed to all but a few. We are not leaving our world, we are becoming aware of another layer of reality that has been there all along and there are troubles as we adjust to the shift just as changing from sea level to high altitude requires pierods of acclimation.

Or this simply could be one of those old familar place changed around by arbitary irritating/menacing authorities for no good reason just to express anxiety type dreams :shrug:

That might provide a clue.

The maze or labyrinth is a common dream motif and in myths as well. Usually it denotes a period
of confusion and uncertainty prior to a period of new undestanding and knowledge. And it's frustrating because it's new territory and we can't rely on our familiar patterns or ways of percieving things to solve the puzzle - which is usually something that is still unconscious that we need to bring into consciousness.

It will eventually drift to the surface like the answers in the magic eightball. Patience.
Write down your dreams, meditate, try to communicate with your unconscious.

You just gotta figure out what the question is.

Things are being rearranged in your life, and you will be losing someone or something for a time but you won't be losing anything permanently, just for awhile until you adapt to the change and those people and things will return to you eventually but in a new place in your life.

I think this comes closest to the dream's most salient meaning. Thanks, everyone!