I keep having dreams about a place i know doesnt and never did exist. My hometown has never had an aquarium, the closest we have is a small koi pond in the town park greenhouses, and the aquatics, reptiles and supplies shop. We dont even really have much of a museum or anything like that, just an old house in the town centre that takes maybe an hour to walk around and get almost the full experince kept up and open by charity funds, and a visitor centre at a ruined castle at the edgr of town. Nothing super impressive with conferance halls and big showy garden ponds. My mum sometimes jokes that the park has a mini zoo, but thats more just a couple of small aviaries full of cockatiels, budgies, miniature doves, canaries and finches, a place where people can take their pets they found themselves no longer able to look after (ehich my parents did after they found out that stan and ollie the cockatiels were actually stan and olivia the cockatiels and they realised they did not have the space nor recourses to care for an entire cockatiel family), and the afforementioned greenhouse with a koi pond.
But theres no aquarium. When you leave the park through that end, all there is is a few idian and chinese takeaways, a nail salon, approximately 6 pubs and some appartments. No aquarium, no massive pond full of large ornimental freshwater fish.
But in my dreams, there isnt an excess of pubs and some good places to eat, theres just trees, and those trees open into a garden with a massive pond. Theres still the river, running alongside the garden, fenced off with a bridge to cross it just like in real life, but instead of going alongside and behind a pub, the river runs alongside and behind a stone building, one that its a mix of the delapidated windmill turned radio station and chippy at the other end of the park and the shire hall and courthouses in the town centre. And in my dreams, this strange building that is a hodgepodge of posturing grandeur and defunct function is an aquarium. It has an ampitheatre with blue carpet and the back wall of the stage being a freshwater fish tank. It has a series of little tanks full of guppies and tetras, all lush and green with plantlife and algae, in the corridor leading off the ampitheatre. I never get any further in my dreams, the nonexistant town park aquarium is never a place i wish to stay in those dreams, its always a place i am trying to escape from, get as far away as possible from, and always either through the town park that is packed up with queues of people in a way it never is in real life, or along the road that runs behind the greenhouses, thats always a lot busier in my dreams than in real life where it is a backstreet, used mainly by people looking for parking spaces, people going to the doctors surgery and pharmacy near the old mill pond, the police vans escorting people to court, or the busses with routes that turn onto that road at the mini roundabout halfway along it. Theres always more people in my dreams, unidentifiable, faceless and with shifting clothes. Or maybe i just never look at their faces in my dreams, or thats one aspect of my dreams that are like real life: people have faces, but i simply cant remember them. I'm never sure why i want to leave the aquarium in these dreams, its different every time. The most recent one we had an urgent bus we needed to catch to cross the country for some undesclosed reason. Another time, my grandparents were in the dream and wanted to take me to a museum in chester that we went to once in reality and so we simply didnt have time to stay in the aquarium.
I wish the aquarium was real, then i would be able to find out what is beyond the corridor with the guppies and tetras, and i wouldnt have to spend £30 on train tickets to get to the nearest aquarium. But its not real. And it never will be. And the closest thing we have to an aquarium un town will probably be the small koi pond in the greenhouse in the town park for many years to come.
