How can this place not be real?
I’m sorry to say that since I last posted this a year ago, I’ve stopped having dreams set in those places I’ve described. What happened?
Ah, well, I don’t know. I miss the woodland path leading down to the old deserted railway cut. And the arm of Raritan Bay that reaches several extra miles inland: how often I’ve fished and boated there.
Where do dreamscapes go? These are two I’d like to have back.
I miss them!
Yesterday it was the computer hutch breaking into pieces, it’s now propped up by a book, and it seems that these items of furniture now are too large to fit into the space we have available. Today the blinkin’ laptop doesn’t work.
I want my dreams! I want my dreams!
After a while, dealing with Nothing Works starts to break me down. Like, as soon as the WordPress problems ease up on me–don’t be fooled: they’re only muscling up to pounce again–the computers themselves grab torches and pitchforks and try to overthrow my reason.
I cannot say why I got out of bed this morning.
I was chatting yesterday with our esteemed colleague, Jan-o, who publishes ghost stories on her blog (bookemjanoblog.wordpress.com). She outdid herself yesterday with a collection of stories about places people visited, but which later turned out not to exist. Like, they’d been there, but there was no there anymore. Most distressing.
There is a place I sometimes dream of. I can easily prove it doesn’t exist, but the dreams are very consistent. I could draw a map of it. Let me try to describe it to you.
At the north end of Main Street in our town is a golf course: the street simply stops in front of it, separated from the landscape by a guard rail.
In the dream there is no golf course, just woodlands, most of it sloping downhill. To the left of the guardrail is a narrow path that will take you down the hill: all the way down to a railroad cut with high banks and streams on either side of the tracks.
If you follow the tracks, the high banks of the cut gradually give way to a flat marshland of dazzling beauty. It extends in every direction as far as the eye can see. Here and there are artifacts of the old days of the railroad: broken-down sheds, broken-down flatcars, stuff like that. And occasionally a slow train comes through, and they will stop for you if you want to get aboard and ride.
In one dream I went down there to catch turtles and found–of all people!–Father Brown (complete with priest’s cassock and umbrella) doing the same. We had a nice chat about turtles until his bishop came along and shooed him back to work. Funny place to run into a bishop.
This country is the same whenever I dream of it. I know what to expect. I like it.
I reason that somehow my mind has put it together out of bits and pieces collected from the real world and assembled into a new pattern. I can tell you where I’ve seen old grey freight cars stuck out in the middle of an expanse of knee-high yellow grass. And our town has an old railroad cut with high banks on either side: used to go down there to catch polliwogs. My dreamscape seems to have been cobbled together out of these familiar elements.
Great cobbling job, though. You’d swear it was real.
How about it? Anybody else out there–do you have dreams like these? Inquiring minds want to know.
I don’t know about you, but sometimes I dream of places that don’t exist. One of them I visited the other night. In the dreams–I’ve been there several times–there is no golf course and country club at the end of Main Steet. Instead, the street dissolves into woodland, with a path leading in. Your car might just about fit, but you’re better off walking or biking. That’s what I do.
By and by the woods thins out and off to one side is an old railroad cut, rarely used by trains. At the bottom, along both sides of the rails, run little streams full of salamanders, crayfish, and pollywogs. Farther along, the land spreads out into meadows and marshes. There’s a train station there, sometimes with a passenger or two waiting for the next train. Here we see ancient, abandoned railroad carts and other equipment peacefully weathering in the sun. We hear assorted shore and marsh birds calling. If you’re into catching turtles, this is a pretty good place for it.
And you’d be surprised who you might out here. The last time I came here, I wound up having a nice long chat with Father Brown (as played by Mark Williams), which regrettably had to come to an end when Father Brown’s bishop came striding up the railroad track to demand that Father Brown get back to church.
I have another dreamscape which I visit sometimes. It’s a fictional arm of Raritan Bay that reaches miles inland, all the way to the adjacent town to mine. It’s nice for boating and fishing: very peaceful. All my dreamscapes are peaceful. No leaf blowers allowed.
I know these places aren’t real, and yet I could draw you detailed maps of them because I’ve been there so often.
Maybe, somewhere, they are real, after all.