Autumn On The Farm

I probably won’t be much good to anyone today as I FARMED ALL DAMNED NIGHT.

I had a very vivid (if factually muddled) dream last night. I suspect it reflects some things that have been in the back of my mind more than any message that might be buried in it, but here goes.

The location was “the farm” in late autumn. This farm pops up from time to time in my dreams. It is based on the farm where I grew up. Most of the geographical features are there, but it always has these glaring anomalies that separate it from the real place.

In this instance there was an old tenant house, a hilltop barn, and several pine trees on the farm that came into play. None of these features ever existed on the farm. In the dream, I lived as an adult in the house in which I grew up that sits at the main entrance to the farm.

I think the barn may have come into play earlier in my dream, but I only have a “clear” memory of it appearing once towards the end of my dream as my father and I passed it. I am not even sure it was on the actual farm. It felt like it belonged to us in the dream, but the location put it just across the property line to the east.

I think we were working in a barn earlier in the dream, but I just can’t remember if it was the same barn or not or if I was remembering another dream within the dream.

The barn in question is a little rundown which is not unusual for tobacco barns around here. It was more unusual that most of the actual farming that took place during the dream was the harvesting of tobacco which I have not participated in (without complaint) for at about 15 years now.

I do not recognize the tenant house in the dream. It has appeared in several dreams over the last couple of years. It sits, rather lonely, on a hillside from “the farm” that was always just a pasture that we drove through to get to the back creek bottoms of the real farm. It is a small one story house, with a simple floor plan consisting of probably 4 rooms. It is a little rundown but clean: reflecting age more than neglect.

In my past dreams the house has always been vacant. In some of them I remember it being downright spooky. It stood out this time because someone was moving in. I can’t say I ever saw them though. I just remember wishing I had gotten something out of the attic, but it was too late since the new tenants were unloading their stuff.

Back to that barn…

In the dream, my father (who passed away last year) and I were driving around the barn. I think we were checking on something or looking for something. In the dream he was old and a little weak, reminding me of the last year of his life. I remember thinking we may not get to do this much longer.

As we passed the barn he commented that some fallen pine trees close by would make excellent fence posts for an upcoming project. I replied that if there were not enough, there was another group of them standing just down the holler in the direction of my childhood home.

There are no pine trees on the real farm. Period. Lots of cedars, maples, hickories, etc…No pine trees.

Finally, I remember loading the wood stove in my childhood home. Incidentally, in the real world that wood stove was taken out when I was a child and replaced with a gas heating stove. But in the dream I was starting a fire and deciding whether or not to close off part of the home before it got really cold. This was something we usually did in real life, although I was too young to be part of the decision. The house was originally built in three sections which made it reasonably hard to heat efficiently.

So was there a reason that my dreams where about places that never existed centered around a place that did exist?

Another thing that I am noticing during my dreams lately is that I am having memories of other dreams during them. This makes recording them very difficult as it is very hard to discern the dream from the memories of other dreams within the dream after the fact.