wacky dreams

Instead of posting about Memorial Day like I was going to...

I'm going to write about a really weird dream I had in the middle of the night and then kept dreaming about over and over again until 6 am.

I was at the sight of a really dilapidated old one room house...set in the late 1800's.  Picture: nicer-ish log cabin style.  There were two windows on either side of the front door, and there was a back door directly opposite the front door.  I peered through the windows and, to my surprise, beheld everything in its proper location.  Almost like if it had ever been lived in, the people who lived there had abandoned it in haste.  But the doors were sealed.

something like this one, but picture forest all around the back of it and no concrete sidewalk.

Next thing I knew I was inside this building somehow.

It was night time, by the way...this fact is semi-important.

I remember feeling scared, but calm at the same time.

Once inside this house, I remember looking around at the simple tools, fabric, furniture and lastly I saw a bookshelf.  On this bookshelf there were modern day binders.  They were the white (yellowed a little from dirt) 2" heavy duty plastic with the clear cover kind. These, I thought looked absolutely out of place...but they also was supposed to be there.

Next thing I knew I saw the figure of a woman appear.  She was a ghost, a spirit, she looked sad and dirty.  I was startled but I knew this woman somehow.  She was my ancestor...my great something grandmother.  She led me to the binders on the bookshelves and bid me open them and read.

The binders contained her history.  Her life, her sadness, her joys, her children.  Her children...as soon as I reached the part about her two children, I saw their little eyes peering up at me from the back door. A girl and a boy. They too were ghosts, I could tell.  Similar to last time, I was nervous, scared, but calm at the same time.  They came into the house and their mother became preoccupied with them.  But she had been telling me the story all along.

All the binders contained were her words--which I heard through the binders, not her voice.  There were paper clippings and photographs, journal entries.  All these things were already in the binders but she was also telling me the story verbatim.

As she told me her story, she became more alive and less like a ghost.  The things on the table tops and the furniture became cleaner as if it was that time period again.  Her children became more lively.  The candles burned brightly.  And finally I finished her story and closed the last binder with a snap.  I put it back on the shelf and she bid me farewell.  I walked out of the house and shut the door.  It was dawn.

And the house looked as it had looked when I first came upon it.  Dilapidated and abandoned.  The people who had lived there were gone and then I woke up with a start in my own bed next to my husband.