I have very strange dreams sometimes. In them, I sometimes find myself wandering in maze-like malls or abandoned cities, or even in fantastically beautiful landscapes that make little to no sense with the way the biomes and terrain connect. Always, there seems to be an element of the abstract or a sense of vague wandering, no matter the actual subject of the dream.

But do you ever dream about old things?

Sometimes, in these strange dreams, I find something old and dilapidated. Something antique. A musty Victorian building, or a cluttered shoppe; a weird, broken down town, or even an odd windowless bedroom every now and then.

Speaking of those odd bedrooms, in one dream, I was wandering around in a relatively ordinary place, when I suddenly found a door, which I opened, and found a very out-of-place bedroom. It was small, dimly lit with no windows. The walls were painted a soft, light pink, coming down to meet halfway with dark brown, wooden wall trim. There were no pictures hanging anywhere that I could see, and on the right, against the wall, was a wooden bedstead, classically carved, with a muted pastel quilt stretched neatly over the mattress and pillows. On the left, directly across from the doorway, was a fairly large wooden vanity table with a chair and plenty of drawers.

There was no sign that anyone actually lived in this room. There was just a feeling that someone had once lived there. I immediately shut the door again and moved on to the rest of my dream.

There has to be a phobia of antique things. There just has to be. My reaction to antique stores and junkyards is so strong sometimes that my family teases me about it.

In these dreams where I see these old, dusty, and lonely places, I often feel a sadness. I feel afraid and uncomfortable too, but not enough to wake up. While awake, I continue to dislike and fear these old places, but yet I feel sort of fascinated with them at the same time.

Have you ever had a nightmare where you’re not scared enough to wake up, but you’re uncomfortable the whole time? It’s the kind of nightmare that lasts because you don’t escape it—you just live with it until you’re awake again. It lingers in a bizarre place between terrifying and interesting, and you remember it long after you’ve had it.

 I wonder why I have these dreams of antique things. Why do I fear them? Why do they bother me so much? Why do I love old things in the context of Renaissance fairs, classic Disney movies on VHS tapes, and books like Little Women or Anne of Green Gables? Why do I feel comfortable with the living antiques captured in those events and stories and not the silent, dead ones left to rot in obscure flea markets?

Why do I love and hate old things at the same time?

Maybe, old, abandoned, dilapidated things just seem lonely to me. They hold whispers of stories I’ve never heard, mysteries of earthly lives that I’ve never had the chance to witness, and things that have since ended years ago. And no one cares for them anymore. They are left on shelves to rust and crumble away into nothing, or are thrown away.

Do I fear becoming an antique? Am I afraid of being abandoned, forgotten, and unable to ever tell my story?

Or do I simply fear being alone?

The Real Dream

I had a bizarre, but very real experience where I went to visit an antique store in Jefferson City (Missouri), which I will not name since I don’t wish to give their store a bad reputation. I was looking for a box to contain knick-knacks, a trinket box, if you will. Little did I know how ridiculously impossible that would turn out to be.

I will never look for anything related to a jewelry box at an antique store ever again.

This antique store was like so many other ones—it was full of dusty antiques. In fact, it was actually more like a flea market—there were booths containing doodads and trinkets from various timelines, and the store, though unimpressive from the outside, seemed much larger than a Goodwill on the inside.

There were two levels. The first floor was mostly modern stuff, with a few modernized antiques mixed in for good measure. The second floor, however, was way different than I was expecting.

The main reason I was so shocked by the second floor is that I was not expecting the, ahem, flea market deal going on up there. I thought it would be laid out like a regular antique shop, except larger, since I had read some reviews online that the store was bigger than it initially appeared.

Instead, when reached the top of the stairs, I was met with a kooky, crazy insane maze, absolutely full of old, strange things. Wandering around in it, it felt and looked exactly like a dream. If I hadn’t known I was awake, I probably would have thought it was.

It didn’t help at the time that I felt extremely depressed, to the point of near emotional numbness, and that, besides the elderly ladies who ran the store, I was literally the only one there. Just me, by myself, wandering around upstairs, searching in vain for a decent trinket box.

If you’ve got antiquephobia too, this is probably already starting to sound horrific to you. Well, it was. It was absolutely traumatizing. I can’t believe the internet still refuses to acknowledge my plight. If you don’t think my fears are real, then you haven’t been alone in an antique store like this.

I had become a vagabond, hopelessly lost in a maddening search amongst nonsensical gimcrackery. No one had welcomed me into this place, I had just wandered in through the front door and up the stairs like a sad ghost. No one else was there appreciating the objects piled high in the corners around me. I had foolishly come alone on a weekday, and there was no one to break the eerie spell, no one to make everything seem fine and dandy like a treasure hunt trip to Goodwill.

And yet, thanks to the depression I was experiencing, I faced the bothersome bric-a-brac with almost total apathy. The constant creaking of the wood floor I walked on was merely an annoyance; the corner filled with a vast collection of porcelain dolls, sitting in their fancy frilled dresses and staring lifelessly at me with their long-lashed, empty glass eyes, seemed almost romantic; the incessant sound of someone sighing, as if someone else was observing the booths, was an odd mystery, since I could never find what made the sound (I knew it wasn’t a person, because I was totally alone upstairs). Even the odd glass case filled with porcelain heads of women that looked like they were from the 1920s, was just weird rather than frightening.

Yup, just weird.

There was no desire to buy anything there, just apathetic stares at everything I passed. I rarely buy things in a dream anyway, since when you wake up the things are gone.

Except this wasn’t actually a dream.

Why was I here?

And why, after not finding the thing I came for in the first place, did I continue to explore this entire nightmare of a store, alone, for two whole hours?

I guess depression and desperation to find a trinket box does very strange things to you.

My mom was getting worried about me and so she called me right before I finally left the store. I’m glad she did, exploring the downstairs area after the bizarre upstairs somewhat helped me feel better, but her call really helped set me right again after that ordeal.

I had finally returned to the land of the living. What a blessed relief.

Having exhausted my search in local stores for a jewelry or trinket box, I turned to Amazon and found the jewelry box I wanted in no time. I ordered it and received it gratefully on my doorstep the next day.

Lesson Learned

Now, I am not preaching that shopping with big, corrupt companies (looking at you, Amazon) is better than shopping at local businesses (I would preach the opposite, in fact!), but at the time I was done looking in places where I had known all along that I would not find the things I was looking for. I was happy to stay at home and comfortably wait for my desired item to arrive instead of wandering around in retro limbo.

Now, I do not know how other extroverts feel about old things, but it is my opinion that introverts would likely enjoy the antique store experience more often than extroverts do, even while alone. I could be abominably wrong about that, but hey, maybe a feeling of being secluded in a dream or cut off from the world is relaxing to y'all.

Meanwhile I am making an official rule for myself to never go into an antique store alone, ever again.

Some people also just have a real love for the past. And, every now and then, someone comes along to give old things new life, and sometimes a polish or a new coat of paint as well. Well-cared for antiques can be very beautiful indeed. If you take good care of them and learn about them, maybe they’ll tell you their stories of the past.

Carousel horses are some of my favorite antiques.

But to those who are nervous at the idea of a 1927 LaSalle in their driveway, with a well-dressed 1930s mannequin sitting in the back seat waiting to go for a nice little drive along the backroads, steer clear of antique stores!

Tags: JustMe, AllPosts