Dreams

I was reading a book titled Haunted Foothills that was co-written by two of my author friends, Mary Ann Mogus and Ed Kelemen. It is a compilation of stories that have uninvited guests from the nether world as characters in the short stories. All are recollections of friends or relatives of visits from these spirits.

The dreams that I mentioned in the title were those of my grandmother Rebecca Miner. The two that I will share, I remember most vividly. The first would be more like a premonition type dream. When I was a child, she told me that she had dreamed that there was a snake in her flower garden. After the dream, she tucked it away and forgot about it.

One morning as she waited for my granddad to return from working the nightshift in the coal mines, she thought that she would weed her flower bed. As she reached down, she had a flashback to the dream. Using her hoe she parted the flowers and weeds to discover there was a snake, coiled and ready to strike. She never said what type of snake it was, but quickly dispatched it with the hoe that she had in her hands.

The second dream seemed a bit more bizarre. One night, she dreamed that a car drove down their farm lane and the driver had no head. It seemed ridiculous and she tucked it away.

Then came a night when she heard someone driving a car down their lane. The lane ended at their barn with a turnaround at the barn. The vehicle drove by their farmhouse and she got up to investigate. She watched from her upstairs bedroom window as the car drove into the turnaround and began to come back down the drive.

The front porch light had been left on and as the car passed, the light cast a shadow into the car. The darkness of the shadow fell across the driver’s shoulder and made him look as though he was headless. I’m sure that there more dreams and stories that my grandparents told me, but I can’t remember them unless my brain is jogged. I want to save and pass along as many as I can before I shuffle off this mortal coil to my family. I don’t want them to be ignorant of their family’s heritage.