sad dream
While in Tylenol3-induced sleep, I had a dream about something in my childhood. It’s ALWAYS something out of my childhood whenever I have codeine.
This dream featured the woods I grew up in. I was in my dad’s living room, peeking out of the golden/yellow 1970’s curtains hanging over the large picture window. I had my little 35mm film camera with me, and I was taking pictures of the woods through the window like I often did as a kid. There were a bunch of boys in the forest below, playing football. I squinted to see them better. They were dressed warmly cuz it was a cold day out. When I looked closer, however, I saw that the floor of the forest was GREEN - there was GRASS down there.
THAT’S not right.
The curtains kept falling back across the window, obscuring my view, and I had to keep pushing the curtains out of my way so I could get a better look at the forest, camera still in hand. I could see now that where all the streams used to be, there was now PAVEMENT in winding paths. The pavement was right over the top of the streams, with the streams flowing beneath them! In the right corner of the forest, near where the boys were playing football, I could see that a portion of the cement path was not there, in order to reveal the stream flowing beneath it.
My eyes scanned the forest and moved towards the left, and I could see less and less trees, and more and more ground, covered over with thick green sod.
The whole place had been turned from a natural wetland into a city park!! People were walking around down there, playing in the park - playing in MY FORMER WOODS - MY FORMER SANCTUARY.
I scanned the forest towards the left of the view out the window, and searched for grampa’s plow - the one that two trees grew through after he’d left the plow in the forest because he was too old and weak, and then had died. I found the plow, but the trees growing through the wheels had been chopped to stubs only in the wheels themselves, and there was no marker explaining the plow’s existence there in the former woods.
And the tree house that Uncle C had built - the trees and boards and the cement tubes were all gone to make for a pretty park.
I began to cry. It was all gone. They took it all away from me.
My crying woke me up - I was crying in real life.
And, in reality, this dream may not be so far fetched, because based upon what my father has told me over the years (reports of developments still coming in every so many months from him), the people who bought my father’s house put a second addition onto the house, and developers nearby have been clearing the forest on the other side of the road from this house, and putting in McMansions. The developers and the city have widened the two-lane highway into FIVE lanes, so of course they’ve cut into the forest. There’s now a sidewalk at the far end of the two-acre front lawn I and the family used to mow with the John Deere tractor.
I need a new sanctuary.
Notes about the dream:
The golden curtains haven’t been hanging in that window since the early 80’s, and he no longer lives in that house since the late ’90’s.
I’m not sure the city could get away with paving over the streams, although I know its done all the time (it’s happening off Highway 101 in San Mateo right now). In the case of the natural wetland near my father’s old house, that valley floods like the devil every spring, because the streams that run through the forest are major tributaries to the Rouge River. So I don’t see HOW it would be possible to fill it in or pave over any part of it. In that regard, I may still have some semblance of my sanctuary left for whenever I visit home. Maybe.
 View out the picture window. |  Looking into the forest from near the garage. |
 The forest in the winter. |  The forest in the spring. |
 The property as it looks today - not much different from how it always looked. |