If you know me, you may agree with my high school chorus teacher in saying that it doesn’t take much to keep me entertained. It’s true. Give me a story and I’ll be out of your hair for hours.
Until the sun sets.
See, along with this whole “living in my head during the daytime” thing comes the “not wanting to go to sleep at night” part.
I had my first real nightmare one Halloween when I dreamed that the skeleton at a haunted house had a black snake for a tongue and it (the snake) was coming after me. (This was long before I’d ever heard of the Dark Mark, I promise.)
It got worse in college. Knives, trains, friends turned enemies, clowns, tornados, you name it, I’ve been afraid of it in my dreams. That’s partly why I can’t stand alarm clocks. I know they are designed to wake a person up, but do they have to sound so much like the shower scene from -Psycho-?
I’m pretty cyclical. Once I get on a nightmare loop, it can take months to get off. That’s not the point of this post though. (Bear with me, I do have one.)
The point is that I do. I know everything is going to be okay when I start dreaming of Dickson again.
Dickson isn’t one of my hometowns. Those would be the three “s”: Scottsboro, Sweetwater and Somerset (with various other cities thrown in). Dickson, at least my dream version of it, doesn’t even really exist anymore. My grandparents died when I was seventeen and I haven’t been inside their house since.
I don’t even remember if the things I dream of are true. Was there really a barn behind the house as well as to the side? I suspect not, but in my dreams, I’m a little girl again and not afraid to go up into the loft. Was I ever really inside the storm celler? The answer to that is probably a negative as well, but when I had that “end of the world dream” that was startlingly like “The Stand”, it was hiding in that very shelter that saved the people I love.
I don’t know if we really ran around the neighbors’ hillsides unattended. I don’t even really know if the neighbors actually -had- hillsides. It doesn’t matter. Not in my dreams.
It also doesn’t matter if I actually rode on a tractor or was brave enough to mount my grandfather’s Palimino, though I don’t really think I was.
The truth is that I probably couldn’t take you there today. I’d get the path mixed up or wind up on the opposite side of Nashville somehow. The truth is that I’ll probably never go back, not really.
But it doesn’t matter. Not as long as I know I can fall asleep and be on that porch again, eating an ice cream cone. Not as long as I know the nightmares are going to end.
Not as long as Dickson is waiting for me.
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