Remembrances: A Dream Killed by Progress

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As a boy, I wanted to be a gas station attendant when I grew up. I liked the snappy beige uniform with your name embroidered in red over the breast pocket where the tire pressure gauge resided.  I loved the gas company logo on the opposite pocket, and I coveted that military-style black-brimmed cap.  

I wanted to be asked to “fill’er up,” or to “put in a dollar’s worth” and listen to the pump’s hum as I scraped smashed bugs off the windshield with my squeegee blade.

I envisioned how I would expertly brandish a cloth-cradled dipstick before the trusting eyes of the proud owner of a shiny late model Packard, Studebaker or Hudson, to prove conclusively that his oil was a quart low and then smoothly punch the gleaming spout through the top of the can before deftly pouring its contents into the hot, clicking engine.

I wanted to keep the change. I wanted to jingle the coins in my right pants pocket, while gazing down the highway, awaiting the arrival of the next customer, first seen climbing through the shimmering heat to roll over the rise, sunlight flashing from the chrome.

But sadly, by the time I was grown and ready to launch a career, the sign above the pump read “Self-Service Only” and my dream was nothing but the relic of a longed-for past, where simple aspirations were enough upon which to build an honest life.

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Remembrances: A Prophetic Dream?

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Awhile back I dug the journal I kept in 1991 out of its corrugated slumber and posted an excerpt from it somewhere on Facebook. Today being Thanksgiving, and I having some time on my hands, I thought I’d see what it was that I had written on this date, nineteen years ago. I found that I had made only one entry on November 25, 1991, and that it had recorded a dream. This dream turned out to have almost uncanny relevance to what’s going on in our world today—as though the echo caused the sound:

[Notes: “CUMC” is Cornell University Medical College, where I was employed prior to moving to Ohio in the spring of 1991. As for “the Sheraton” reference—I worked in a Sheraton hotel restaurant in Ann Arbor in 1968-1969. There was an employee locker room there.]

Nov. 25.

I awoke this morning from a dream in which I was about to leave a building that looked like CUMC. I was stopped in the hallway by a short, fat security guard who asked me where I was coming from. I said I was coming from the employee’s locker room (the Sheraton). He gave me a look that indicated that this was the wrong response for some reason. He told me to turn around and spread against the wall. I feel shame, but no guilt. I haven’t done anything. Having tried to comply with his demand, I find that I can’t position my feet properly – they get tangled up and I can’t seem to get them into the proper position.

The message of this dream would seem to be that compliance with fascist coercion leaves a man without a leg to stand on. You might want to keep that in mind, if you’re ‘flying the happy the skies’ over the holidays.
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Reflections: Out of My Depth

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The entry in my journal for September 10, 1991 which immediately preceded the one quoted in my last post was this:

I once had dreams of wading, following a beautiful, shallow river to the outskirts of a city. I had dreams of discovering in the ground of cache of coins – and more turned up in the sand the deeper I dug. I dreamed of being in a night city, down in the train yards, and finding there a deep pool full of beautiful, glowing fish that swam up near the surface, and then dove again for the inky depths. It does not seem now that the strange fish I encountered in the city when I had arrived there in reality were equivalent to those dream fish – but it could be that I’m wrong; that something is being overlooked. So far as I can remember, I never dreamt of a fish with a coin in its mouth.

Dreams of buried talents… subconscious a-boil with hidden beauty…

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Reflections: In Dreamtime

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I have long been haunted by the memory of a dream that I had forty years ago, circa 1970-71. In 1991, my first year in Ohio after leaving New York, I kept a journal in which I examined my life up to that point. Included in this journal were sketches of any dream that I had dreamed in my lifetime, the power of which had been such that it was never forgotten. This morning, prodded into action by reading of some dreams related by Pentimento on her blog, I dug that journal out of its box. I was gratified to find that I had, indeed, written down what I remembered of the dream in question there. On September 10, 1991, I wrote:

The dream that I wish I could remember more clearly I had in Brooklyn, now twenty years ago. I was in the presence of, I think, three robed and hooded old men. I am certain that there were more than one. I usually dream in color, but there is no color associated with this dream, perhaps because the light is so dim. I am receiving instruction in some mystery. I have been asked a question that presumably I have been taught enough to answer. I feel anxiety that I will fail to answer correctly and that I will fail my instructors, who are plainly wise men, wizards. But suddenly, led on I think by some kind of prompting recapitulation on the part of the wise men, the answer comes to me and I blurt it out proudly and joyfully – “Oil!” If only I could remember the preceding instruction so that I could know the mystery to which “oil” is the correct answer.

I did not write in 1991 that I am quite certain that I was being instructed from a text. I am also quite certain that the three wise men were not of earthly provenance. In addition to being prompted by Pentimento, I was again set to musing about this dream by this illustration of the three “men” who visited Abraham, from Chapter 18 of Robert Crumb’s The Book of Genesis Illustrated:


I call this dream “haunting” because of my tentative but persistent belief that the mysterious question to which “oil” was the correct answer –and the key to knowledge – was: What will bring about the End of the World?

Prophetic prescience?
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Reflections: Dreamtime

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In 1991, the year we moved from New York City to Ohio, I kept a daily journal for only the second time in my life (the previous period had been my senior year of high school.) In 1991, I was functioning as a househusband. I had two toddlers to watch, and otherwise plenty of time to read and write.
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Yesterday, I skimmed through the two spiral notebooks comprising the 1991 journal, looking for any mention of the rather strange drawing that you see below:

In addition to keeping a journal that year, I had become interested in my dreams. This interest was due in large part to my readings of the oeuvre of Swiss psychiatrist/philosopher, Carl G. Jung. Many of the pages of the journal log contemporary dreams. Others refer to remembered dreams, some going back to my early childhood.

It is a phenomenon, which you can profitably investigate in yourself, that if your conscious mind begins to take an active interest in your dream life, your dream life will reciprocate. You will begin to have more vivid and more meaningful dreams. It will also become increasingly easier for you to remember your dreams, once you have trained your conscious mind to hold onto them by writing them down immediately upon waking.

When I found this strange picture (while boxing backwards), I remembered that it was the visual record of a dream. But I had retained no psychological context for it. I was hoping that I’d written about it in 1991, but this proved not to have been the case.

Last night, some hours after going fruitlessly through my journal, it came to me suddenly that the strange style of the drawing—it doesn’t look like something that I would draw—is due to the circumstance that in the dream this picture was itself an illustration in a book. When I remembered this, I simultaneously remembered that the image was, for some reason, terrifying at the time. The dream had been a nightmare. The effect upon me of this image was so strong that I had been compelled afterward to try to reproduce it.

Looking at it now, I can’t say what it means, or why it was so horrifying. Neither do I remember when I had the dream. The drawing isn’t dated.

I tell this tale in order to encourage anyone who has never done so to spend some time exploring the strange world through which he travels in dreamtime. It can be a most rewarding undertaking.

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