Hidden Staircases, Secret Rooms

So, being thirty has its perks, aside from being able to date from three different decades without being (terribly) creepy and the assumption that if you're living with your parents it's because you're taking care of them in their twilight years and not still mooching while you finish college.

Of the perks I just found out is that I get to join Studio 30+ which is a nifty group for bloggers over the age of 30.  The following is my first weekly post for this group.   The prompt is "Childhood Dreams".

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I'm on the floor again.  It's the third night in a row.  The third night sleeping in the big giant bed in the loft at my grandparents house.  The third night I've woken on the floor beside the little dormer window, the one where you have to crouch down because the ceiling slopes so low that it's impossible, even for a little girl such as myself, to stand at full height.  I'm chilled, in my thin purple nightgown with the kittens on the tummy. Rings of frost circle the leaded panes of the window.  I can see my breath hanging in the night air.

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Groggily, I turn to crawl back over to the enormous queen-sized bed with the royal blue spread, but out of the corner of my eye something is not right.  In the tiniest corner of the room, right next to the window, the only window in the room, right where normally there's stood only an oddly angled door to a small storage cabinet - angled oddly to compensate for the low sloping ceiling - there in the mist of the vague light of the earliest time of the morning is a staircase.

"That's never been there before.." I think to myself.  However, I am very small, and my mind is always jumping.  But I'm sure if there had always been a staircase there, I would have noticed.

Hunched over, I crawl back towards the window.  Looming before me is a dark, narrow, foreboding wooden staircase.  The top steps are obscured by the blackness of the tiny passageway.  I can only imagine what waits at the top.

Over the years I've dreamed time and time again of familiar places, places I have been to countless times, spent countless hours in, visited on numerous occasions.  My grandparents house, my high school, the local post office, the library.  I dream of these places, and always, in my dreams there is something new, something undiscovered in places I thought I knew as I know my own body.   Always there are stairs.  Reaching conclusions, making discoveries, stretching the boundaries of my imagination.  My secret, hidden surprises.