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PEGGY FIELDINGS NEWSLETTER

Vol. 4 Number 8 August 2004

DREAM ON

Several of my beloved subscribers emailed to ask if I would include the dream article which appeared in The Sundance Journal some years ago, so that's the next thing up. This particular dream was set in Oilton, Oklahoma, where I graduated from high school. The names in my piece were pseudonyms but anyone who ever lived in Oilton, people such as Dale Denny, Bobby Williamson, Lois Oliver, Pamela Morsi, Eldon Robb or my cousin, Julia Mae Bice Hoover and others, will know the correct name for each and every store and person.

WHAT STRUCK ME

I had a sudden realization that I'd never dreamed this particular recurring dream again after selling it to Sundance, although I do sometimes find myself in Oilton in my dreams but under different circumstances and with other people.

MY RECURRING DREAM FOR MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS

PROLOGUE

Why is it that I find my dream so terrifying? When I examine the dream in the light of day, there is an ominous quality that causes me to tremble. And yet, when I try to recreate the emotions I always experience during the dream, I find I am serene, watchfully serene.

Nevertheless, when I think of the dream, or try to relive it, I feel tears falling. I am not crying. There are no sobs. The tears seem to fall purely of their own volition. The tears fall and my heart beats faster.

The tears are falling now as I write this. What is it? Perhaps if I write it all down I can determine the meaning of the dream or explore its significance.

The dream comes when I least expect it. Sometimes I think it is gone for good, then it returns. It came again last night.

It starts in the town of my childhood, usually at the corner where our town's four-block Main Street is intersected by the state highway. I am standing on that corner looking, looking...at the red brick high school on my left toward home, than at the rest of Main Street on my right. There are a few houses, but there are many more flat brick or wooden buildings that make up the business section.

Another way the dream can begin shows me walking toward home. If it begins there, I know I have "come in in the middle."

As I walk toward our house, I realize that I am carrying something under my arm. A loaf of bread? I carried many things down that street.

The dream can begin a third way, with me inside our house looking out the front-door glass up toward Main Street. My fingers touch the thick, plum-colored paint on the frame around the old door.

The dream always ends at that door.

In my dream I am no longer a nearly forty-year-old woman. I am a child again. I know that is so because the heavy iron pipes that form an enclosure for the schoolyard are just above my eye level when I turn to look at them.

I see that the high school is closed. It is late afternoon on a warm summer day. The shadows are long. Everything is bathed in a reddish light from the sun that is dropping down at the other end of Main Street where the railroad tracks block the west end of the street. Our house is set facing the sun at the east end of Main.

From the corner where I stand I can see the whole of Main Street, all the houses and stores on either side. And I can see our house.

The panes of glass in the facade of the old house are blankly red, reflecting the sunset. Nobody can see into those windows at this time of day, even if they should be standing on the porch of the house. But someone inside can see out, I know.

Yes Now I see what is strange. The school isn't the only place where there is no life I can see. There are no cars, no people. Only the gleaming red windows up and down the street.

Mr. Berlin's filling station is closed, no one there. I move across to Ogilvie's garage. Ogilvie's garage was closed and vacated long before my family came to live in the town. Even so, now I put my hands on each side of my face and peer into the garage windows, as I did so many times in my childhood. Dust, thick dust and two old cars, Chevrolets of the 1930s.

An empty lot, then the Baptist Church. It looks as I remember it. The trees on the other side are moving gently in the faint summer breeze. The church looks friendly but the doors won't open at my tug. I can't get in.

Across and up the street a way is where my music teacher lives. In a town of private houses and one-story buildings, she lives in an upstairs apartment. The old, red brick building was abandoned during the Depression. It had been a hotel when the citizens had had grandiose plans for their oil boomtown. Now the building stands gaunt and empty, except for Mrs. Warren. She carved out a kingdom for herself and her little daughter and her old parents. She had, by some strength of will power, made an apartment from a maze of those old abandoned hotel rooms. She must have been a squatter in the old building, keeping for family afloat on twenty-five cents an hour, when we music students could afford to pay her that. When we couldn't pay, she gave us lessons free.

It was there in that oddly shaped apartment that I first had some inkling of what the world outside the small town might be like. Mrs. Warren's family, like my own, had drifted there from a better past. Her parents were British. They were the only people in the town who spoke with a foreign accent.

That is not true. The Naifehs live across the street from Mrs. Warren's ghostly building. You could see them every day in the clothing store up the street, but no one I knew had ever been inside their house. I sometimes had glimpses of the Naifehs and their out-of-town visitors, Syrians like themselves, laughing and talking and eating. I used to long to share some of their exoticism, to wear their dusky skins, to have their languorous brown eyes.

But now there is no one in either place. I know it. I could go to every store. I go to every store. Everything is as I remember it-but there are no people, no movement except that of a crumpled piece of paper moving in the gutter, pushed by the faint breeze.

I turn toward home. I am carrying something--maybe the twenty years of life that have been lived since I left this small town.

At the top of the hill I stop. Taking a deep breath I run wildly down the last block toward home and push open the heavy front door. The house is silent.

This place is a little different. I search every room. All the rooms look just as they used to, except that nearly all the furniture is gone. All, except the twin beds in my room and the table in the kitchen. Three dresses form my school days hang in my closet.

I feel content to be here. In my dream I stand at the front door looking up toward Main Street. I wait. I watch. Perhaps I am waiting to go where everyone else has gone.

In the innocence of a lost childhood I am waiting for something. Is it death? Or a new beginning in life?

CONTEST, CONTEST, CONTEST

Now all you clever subscribers may submit 50 words or fewer to diagnose the dream. If you can amuse me or scare me or interest me in some other exotic way with your analysis of my dream, I will send you your choice of SALLY or BARBARA or HOW TO WRITE AND SELL MAGAZINE ARTICLES or CONFESSING FOR MONEY or STADIUM KIND OF LOVE. The top four best writers amongst you readers will win!

Along with your penetrating dissection of my dream please send your name and your US Mail address and your book title of choice, so I can ship your prize right to you. And yes, I am the final judge. Go for it, my friends. Send your entries by email or via US Mail (Box 50347, Tulsa, OK 74150.)

MY PAL JACKIE Jackie King

Jackie King is recovering somewhat from the unexpected death of her youngest child, her son John. She looks thinner, but not gaunt with sorrow as she did a few weeks ago. One can never really recover from such a loss but Jackie is making a valiant effort to return to normal living. She is a lovely woman and a good writer. We need her back among the toing and froing of a writer's everyday life.