I loved the following, evocative line by Alec Wilkinson in a recent New Yorker article:
I used to dream sometimes that I had found rooms in my apartment that I didn’t know were there, and, as I explored them, I felt a serenity that I did not feel in my waking life.
What rooms would if I discover if I dreamt along similar lines – and what girls would be suffering in them?
An attic, for sure, with a maid crying herself to sleep after a post-dinner birching. A teenage daughter’s bedroom – the girl sleeping face down after being sent to bed early then hairbrushed soundly over my knees. A dungeon, perhaps – cold, dark, damp. Girls manacled to the walls, bearing the marks of their earlier whippings.
Oh, how my mind could wander… even before it populated the spaces we do actually have with kinky friends, sore from play!
What rooms would you dream up?
A forbidden room to which I had a misappropriated key, high in the eaves, with a door to an Elizabethan roof, from where I could see but not be seen and almost anything could happen, but where it would be o.k to be just solitary and secret.