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Nightmares

Nightmare #113 – Fields of Asphalt

…In the distance, near the woods, there were the beginning structures of a strip mall…

(Male) I don’t know if this is the kind of thing that you’re looking for but it’s a dream I’ve had for maybe twenty years now every once and awhile. The dream is extremely ominous and makes me feel extremely sad. The thing you have to know for the dream to make sense is that I used to spend summers on my aunt and uncle’s dairy farm. Just acre after acre of open fields. I learned how to drive on a tractor when I was like 12. There were periods of intense work like when they harvested hay but then other times when I had nothing better to do than gather wild strawberries.

Anyway, in the dream, I’m visiting the farm and my aunt and uncle. I look across the old dirt road and there a construction crew paving over the field where I used to gather wild strawberries. In the distance, near the woods, there were the beginning structures of a strip mall. I am horrified and I ask when this happened. It doesn’t seem like a big thing to my aunt and uncle. They seem so beaten down and fatalistic in the dream which is not what they’re like in everyday life.

In the version of the dream I had most recently, they were down to four cattle which they kept in their front yard (!) They were heading into town to see if they could barter with someone, to see if they could trade four bales of straw (which is bedding material) for one bale of hay (which is food.) Even with just four cattle, one bale of hay wasn’t going to go very far.

I’ve had some variant of this dream so many times that whenever I visit my aunt and uncle (which perhaps isn’t as often as I want to) I just stand and stare out over the fields, just making sure that they aren’t being paved over.