Magellan's Log: Iris Murdoch: Dreaming

"She dreamed she was in Belmont, but the house had become enormous like a palace, and rather dark and twilit as if pervaded by a yellowish fog. Alex was walking through the house, sometimes accompanied by a woman who seemed to know it better than she did. In the course of this walking, Alex found herself alone in a gallery from which she looked down into a large dim room, almost like a hall, which was full of all sorts of lumber. The room was obviously abandoned and, Alex felt, had not been entered for a long time. Tables and chairs and boxes and piles of things like lamp-stands and old clocks lay about in disorder, and near the middle of the room there was an old-fashioned gramophone with a huge horn. Alex, looking down into the silent abandoned foggy room, felt terrible fear. She thought, but there is no such room in Belmont. Where could such a large secret derelict room be in my house? She hurried away and told her discovery to the woman who seemed to know the house so well. The woman said, ‘Oh, that’s just the old downstairs sitting-room, remember?’ and threw open a door to reveal a shabby disordered room which Alex recalled as a former housekeeper’s room. Alex thought with relief, oh yes, that’s all it is! Then, looking, she realized that this ordinary room was not the room that she had seen."
--The Philosopher’s Pupil.