Blue_Opossum

Morning of August 24, 1970. Monday.



This dream, I consider one of my most significant and “unexplainable” childhood dreams, as well as it being one of the longest of the time period. I called it “The Old Shack” in my original childhood journal. My dream’s back story started by three classmates and I (Tina L, Brenda W, and best friend Toby T) doing a real-life-based childish routine on the song “Sugar Shack” and pretending to mess up in timing, and going “whoops, it exploded… boom!” …“accidentally” (on purpose) flowing into the Nancy Sinatra song “Sugar Town”. School had gotten out June 5th this year.

My dream featured a strange old (fictional) wooden building (a “sugar shack” I had supposed - but not really - one room had an old bed we all “slept” on which seemed to be oriented from the middle of the south wall) where one room on the north end of the main room seemed sort of “burned” or dark, with very loose and missing floorboards as well as missing wall and ceiling parts - and appeared in different ways at different times (in terms of age). The only other feature in this shack of note are ragged curtains with only about fifty percent of the cloth left. There was a strong emotional focus on my dream at the time, but I did not know why. My dream also had typically recurring elements. The juvenile (in this case) “four in a bed” concept likely but innocently could have been inspired by promos (or newspaper theater advertisements) for “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice”, though I had no idea what the movie related to other than from the Mad Magazine parody us four read in real life (and of course did not really find that amusing - and it certainly did not encourage us into looking forward to being “idiotic” adults, though I usually enjoyed most features in Mad Magazine), though I do not know the day it was bought - the cover date says September 1970, but it likely was available in June 1970 or earlier. The hair color (three dark, one blonde) matched, and I had a brother-in-law named Bob and a sister (not Bob’s wife) named Carol.

In my dream, a normal rabbit (possibly modeled after my mother’s pet rabbit Cindy, though it seemed wild in my dream) had gone through the doorway that led in and out of the unusual room (though the floor did not seem strong enough or complete enough to walk on or even to actually enter the room). Later, it was a giant rabbit (bigger than a horse), but was not dangerous in any way. There is also a part where a snake grows larger but does not threaten us - though we do see it crawl past the open front door (on the east side of the building - the back door being on the west side), being about half the height of the doorway and this concerns Tina. At one point (when events are getting to a point where we need to leave), she says (in her “fake” British accent) “…but what about the rabbit?”

Tina had placed a sparrow with a broken wing through the doorway at one point, and it had begun to grow larger. It eventually becomes a pterodactyl after flying over the shack and she seems a bit concerned about what she did. She also puts an old wilted bouquet of flowers (from the southwest dusty corner of the large room) through the doorway and the blooms become fresh. I am not sure how the room works at any point. Does it move through time (thus causing other things to change), or just make things bigger at times? I can understand how the sparrow became a pterodactyl if prehistoric “throwbacks” (as well as futuristic ones) are implied with time shifting, but that does not explain why the rabbit (and snake) - as well as my thumb near the last scene - just became larger.

My friend Toby (who is wearing a cheap wristwatch) sticks his hand through the doorway to “test” it somehow (based on curiosity about how other things that had happened - such as the restoration of part of the torn curtain to becoming complete and like new) and ends up with a changed watch that is complex and computerized - there even seems to be a miniature slot machine video game on it (before I ever saw or heard of computer games as such). In real life, years later, such things actually existed as seen in my dream years before, which I found quite interesting.

Near the final scenario, I had placed my right hand through the doorway and my thumb cramped up in great pain and grew nearly twice as large (I do not typically experience this level of pain in a dream).

My dream had ended by me trying to reach an apparently known “portal” after running out the back door (though I am not sure what influenced this - possibly a “Star Trek” episode) and across a mostly featureless large grassy field, around the same time that the reddish pterodactyl (that had transformed from the sparrow) made a shadow on the ground near me as I was running (and I assume that it was ready to attack me) and I just made it through the old isolated trellis which was being used as an arched gate as part of a broken fence - which was supposedly the “portal” from my dream into reality (and probably the “cure” for whatever the room in the shack had changed) - though I am beginning to only become slightly lucid at this point (the situation nearly identical in mood and physical awareness to the event in the “Dogpile” dream of 1972 where I leaped through the front door of my Cubitis home) as I saw the pterodactyl become a sparrow again, and fall to the ground just after crossing above the supposed “portal”. (The pterodactyl shadow is likely a replay of a real-life event concerning a buzzard flying over me, of which numerous dreams were influenced by.)

The outcome:

Exactly six years later in real life (August 24, 1976)…I was in the hospital, my right thumb enlarged to nearly twice the size (exactly as in my dream) due to a completely unexpected medical condition, caused by an unexplainable series of four (and a half) cysts, all the same size except for the new one just starting, which all apparently had embryonic properties as if my body suddenly decided to grow a few other siblings from my thumb (though this followed other dreams which were also precognitive to this event). There was not the slightest indication of this until the summer vacation of 1976 when I first noticed the first one growing (with no hints or known causes beforehand), but did not get it checked out until there were four in a row, and by that time, a fifth had started closer to my wrist.

The CBS late movie that was playing the night prior to the morning of my operation was “Night of the Lepus” from 1972 - about giant rabbits of the same size orientation as the one from my dream. There is more, but the detail is minor compared to the significance of the two main synchronous links.

Though this pales in comparison to nearly endless unexplainable “mystery girl” associations and numerous other mysteries (including my present knowledge of fractals in the language and certain types of patterns), I still find this one interesting, all in all, relative to the main reason I started paying attention to my dreams when very young and why I started dream journalism in the first place - because no adult could be honest or tell me how dreams continuously “echoed” into reality, often with precise visual detail of something not seen (or even existing) until later. There is no excuse for such ignorance or denial (or replacing personal experience with incompatible religious beliefs) - as each person has a will to make a life for himself - and to validate his own understanding successfully.