Dreams
“Dreams, if they're any good, are always a little bit crazy. ”― Ray Charles
Most children have dreams that upset them occasionally. Scientists tell us that most people dream every night, but only a vivid few reveries are remembered in the cold light of dawn. I had several recurring dreams during my childhood.
When I was seven years old, the school bus stopped about a half mile from the family dairy farm. I would pedal to the junction in the morning, lean my bike against a tree, and climb on the bus when it showed up.
After school, the bus would rattle down the gravel road for ten miles, and drop me off at the bus stop. I could follow the gravel road back to the farmhouse, or take the shortcut through “Snake Acres” an overgrown wood lot with an abandoned farm in the gloomy middle.
At night I often had a dream; I was walking my bicycle through Snake Acres, the tires crunching dried leaves. I saw no snakes at the little log bridge, but as I passed the blackened, leaning farmhouse, a horse appeared in a gaping window. The white head and neck were framed by the dark boards, and the horse’s eyes followed me as I pedaled past.
The “Night Mare” awoke me, my heart thumping away in my chest. An old Burl Ives folk song, Tam Pierce, was stuck in my brain:
When the wind whistles cold on the moors at night,
Tam's old gray mare doth appear ghastly white.
And all the night long be heard skirling and groans,
From Tam's old gray mare and her rattling bones.
I have no idea why, but for years the Night Mare would appear in my dreams, and I would wake up all sweaty, and wrapped in tangled sheets.
Another repeating dream started a couple of years later. Sputnik II, or Muttnik as the papers have dubbed it, had launched weeks earlier. Although it is the second of the artificial moons to go up, it was the first to carry a living inhabitant of our planet. The craft’s sole passenger was a dog named Laika. I knew, with a terrible certainty, where the spent rocket would come screaming down.
The flaming meteor would first appear in the night sky above the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. It would unerringly streak across the Newfoundland sky towards the Argentia Naval Station. As the Russian missile crashed into the roof of my family’s quarters, it would tear apart in fiery chunks, and the scorched, grotesque corpse of Laika would brutally strike my bed. My bones broken, my body fatally burned, I must glimpse the grinning skull of this martyred creature before losing consciousness. Then I woke up.
Not all my dreams frightened me; some were tantalizing.
When I was Baptized, at ten years old, a teenaged girl was immersed in the glass-front baptistry in a small town church in Arkansas. When it was my turn, I walked down in the tepid water, and got dunked as well.
That night, after I’d said my Prayers, I fell into a deep sleep.
I didn’t dream about the ghastly white mare, or the Rapture. I did dream about Janet Bailly’s wet robe clinging to her body as she rose up out of the water. I woke feeling guilty, realizing that there was something wrong with me, or maybe Satan was tempting me…
There are plenty more dreams, schemes, and waking nightmares in Cold ‘Coon & Collards, and its sequel, Lightbulb Coffee, available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Books, Inc.