more debris

I don't dream often. My brain goes through its cycles, commonplace images present themselves and swirl away. Flashes of stars and ships, conversations, places. I don't dream of the past, memories come in waking hours or not at all. People I have known come to me, but they're just there, meaningless characters.
Last night I dreamt of my grandfather. He was sitting in the cargo bay, pounding on one crate after another and reading Shakespeare. I think it was The Tempest, but I cannot be sure. Its hard to remember the words, he was reading the old translation, not the new tracks found on Comweb. Most literature is gone, but the watered-down plays linger still. Probably because they still touch what matters to most of us; confusion, lust, love, and loss. The originals have been reworked (that is to say, murdered) to be accessible, schools buy Accessworks packages in some attempt to tribute humanity's outdated genius.
I wonder what else has been lost, what books I'll never have the chance to find.
All day my head has been ringing with my grandfather's voice, "Methinks he hath no drowning mark upon him". There's no way I'll ever know where that comes from. How can I be a keeper of knowledge with no place to find it? I can only carry so many books, and while there must be others like me out there, I haven't met them. Maybe I never will.

Perhaps such dreams mean nothing. Random collections of brain tissue crackling inside my spaceshook skull. Oberon itself is an ancient Shakespearean name, dredged up from nowhere that anyone remembers. Consider that two days ago I dreamt of Caban wearing a pink shirt and filling a bathtub. So then that is it, I simply want a bath. Which explains why Ice has been looking at me so strangely these past two days. She thinks I don't notice.

For all that we have lost, some things never change.