Vermilion River Valley
Streator, Illinois
Our Aino, the mother of my father, believed in prophetic dreams. She came to visit me at Owosso Memorial Hospital. I was a patient. She confided in me. “Last night, I dreamt of a farmhouse in ruins. I knew the farmhouse. My husband and I had helped your parents buy the the old building. An earthquake had struck. I saw you, sick on a stretcher, set out on the lawn”.
I stood by you and cooled your brow with water. I woke up. The phone rang. Your mother said you were in the hospital. I knew it. I knew it. The dream told me. We got in the car and drove out”.
Aino said this the way people talk today about a show they are binge watching. Let's go back in time to 1926. I imagine her sitting at school in Painesville Michigan with her friends, taking turns, telling what dreams had passed during the night. I know the names of her circle of friends because her friends read her copy of Elmer Gantry and signed on the inside cover. It was a radical act of reading, reading Sinclair Lewis in the Keweenaw Copper Country.
I’m unsure of the prophetic power of dreams. Yet, I read Freud on dream interpretation in college and took “craft classes” in poetry. I’ve tried to write down dreams in the morning. Lately, I’ve been successful. The last dream dreamt last night explored the imagery of leeches, those floating flatworms that suck blood.
Maybe my subconscious has compared COVID-19 to leeches, both creatures of the wild that behave like parasites. I made the following notes upon waking. Writing made me remember a leech that clamped onto my left hand while swimming in Grass Lake.
I built pools of pond water. I built the walls of stone. I added leeches to the water and the leeches engendered crayfish crawfish, the crawdads pinching leeches in their claws.
I had a leech leech leech on my hand at Camp Tapico. It landed on my hand while I was swimming. The blood sucking leech can be called the tick of water.
I flailed my hand in the air, but the leech wouldn't fly off. It had yet to sink its teeth into my hand. A camp counselor calmed me down and lightly flicked the leech with his index finger. The leech began to crawl and he plucked it off my hand and tossed it into the shallows.
The shallows are shallow at the very margin between beach and water. I watched the leech in the water, rolling and moving with the wavelets, a black ink smear on a golden sand.
The leeches in the dream were more like water caterpillars. Hopping out of the waters, they clamped onto my leg. I was wearing shorts. I worried I would be covered with leeches.
When I awoke, I was clean.
One summer, I found a turtle beset with leeches on its leg. I never removed them. Would the turtle have bled out?
I never saw one on a fish or used a leech for bait.
“Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious,” said Sigmund Freud. What journeys are you willing to undertake?
By GlebK - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13669380
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