Dream Archive 24: Célèbre

A man came into the bookstore where I was hanging out. For whatever reason I was over by the Language section. He pointed to a book called FAMOUS and insistently tapped it with his finger while saying something in French. He was worked up about something. He grabbed a French-English dictionary and tried to show us what he wanted. We figured out that he was trying to find the French word for “famous” so he could learn what it meant. The man’s companion told my friend a story. Apparently the man’s wife had died, and the last word she said was “famous.” He had never been able to figure out what she meant because he didn’t know the word’s meaning.

The internet didn’t seem to exist in this world. We began searching the dictionaries, but none of them had the word. Some of them turned into nonsense in the section where the word should be. I was frantically paging through them, and I got so upset that I ripped out one of the pages in frustration. I offered to pay for it, but my friend who worked at the bookstore said I didn’t have to. The closest word we could find was “notoriété” (notoriety), which wasn’t close enough. Having failed the man, I asked for his phone number so I could contact him when I found the answer. His companion gave me a business card which had an email address on it, so maybe the internet existed after all. I was sitting and thinking, holding the card with the edge pressed against the side of my face. It slipped and brushed my eye. I was worried I had given myself a paper cut on my eyeball. 

QUESTION: Why have the past two dreams included both bookstore and famous? Did this dream come from the previous one? Or from writing down the previous one?

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