- My Odd Dreams A Short Story by Joel Miller

Everything is so confused in my dream. Why is it all so mixed up? It is never this way. Is it a dream or a reality? I feel can see the wagon wheel being made, but again, where did the disc come from? There is the iron pot being made too. I am conscience again and back to reality. No wonder, the iron pot is attached to a wagon wheel rim. The rim is welded to a twenty four inch disc. The vision is all run together. It should all be different stories, not all in the same vision. I will try again, this time touching just the cast iron pot.

Maybe here I better explain what I am raging about. Ever since I can remember, I have had the ability to touch something and I will sometimes be able to go back to a time when it first was made or used. At an early age I once found a toy truck in the dirt. I was playing with it when my mother asked where it came from. I told her it belonged to Jimmy and he lost it in the dirt. Thinking it was just another imaginary friend, she let it drop. She knew I had a lot of make-believe friends she couldn't explain. I just thought everybody could see into the past like I did. I am not a paranormal type that believes in the spooks and ghosts, but I do know what I have been able to do and see all my life. To me it is real, regardless of what others think.

As I grew older, friends thought I was just weird. I would touch something and sometimes be able to see who it had belonged to, in the past. After holding or touching an object, I could sit down and visualize its past life. Was I daydreaming or did I really have the ability to see into the past? I am now eighty-five and still go back in time on certain objects and I still can't explain it. Frustrating? No. It is just a part of my life. It doesn't happen all the time, but at some unknown time and some unknown place, it still happens.

Now, back to the old iron pot. This is the story my grandmother told me many years ago:

When my grandfather was twentyfour years old, his family left Arkansas, in 1903, in a covered wagon, trying to find a better life in Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma. While they were traveling, the old cast iron pot was dropped and cracked. They camped by a creek just inside the Indian Territory line. My grandfather went into the closest town to buy supplies. While there, he bought another sixty gallon black iron pot. I was there with my grandfather when he bought the pot and returned to the wagon. I was there when my great grandmother used it for the first time.

They settled in a small community in western Indian Territory, later called Pocasset, Oklahoma. They bought a small farm and lived there many years. My grandfather met a young farm girl there and in 1909 married her. His wedding gift included the cast iron pot. Over the years there was hogs rendered in it, clothes were washed in it, Lye soap was made in it, and it helped cook many meals. Through the years it was saved and eventually it came to me, to be displayed in my front yard. Was I dreaming when I touched it or was I reliving its history through my grandmother's memory? I honestly don't know.

Incidents like this has happened to me over the years. I have always had the ability to make up history (or relive history) on certain objects I touch.

I grew up on a rented farm in southern Oklahoma during the depression. There was no electricity, water, or sewer, and no natural gas. We had coaloil lamps, outhouses and wood burning stoves. After my sister passed away, I was given an old coal-oil lamp that belonged to some member of the family. As I put it up on the mantle for display, I could smell the unmistakable odor of burning coal oil. Later, as I sat in my chair, I got a vision of an old farm house I did not recognize, but the woman was my great grandmother, my grandmother's mother, the time was around 1890, in the Texas panhandle (as told by my father.) It sat on an old wooden table where great grandmother, nine children, and my great grandfather ate their meals. My great grandfather was a cook for Charles Goodnight trail drives and quite often, the lamp was the only source light while he was gone. I knew my great grandmother until she passed away when I was about twenty-five. I don't remember her telling us about the lamp, but she did have a lot of stories growing up in that time period. I guess she could have mentioned the lamp, but most of her stories had to do with the hardships of the time.

My wife and I had an antique store years ago and some of the things we bought would bring forth these dreams (day dreams and night dreams.) We were on a picking trip in Minnesota and found a farm auction. Of all the antiques we bought, this book was the only thing that gave me that feeling of the past. I remember the old book about Winnie, the Pooh. I know, I have known Winnie, the Pooh all my life. My mother used to read it to my sister and me when we were young, but when I picked this particular book up, I got this feeling that I knew where it came from, but I did know a little more history about the book.

During the depression, a little girl from Illinois was given the book as a birthday gift, the House at Pooh Corner. She was an only child and became totally engrossed in the characters. She lived with Winnie, Piglet, Eeyore, Christopher Robin, Owl, and Roo. They became her constant companions. She talked with then, ate with them, and slept with them. Like all children, they were her secret pals. She shared her secrets and adventure with them and in return, they were always there for her, night and day. Eventually, she grew out of her childhood and the book, and all her playmates were forgotten. The book was put away when she grew older and married. My dream stopped there. I never knew anymore about it until we brought it back to the store. Once again, when I held the book, I got the feeling I did not know how the book ended up in that farm auction.

During the second World War, a twelve year old boy and his younger sister were given the book by a young college girl. When she was small, it had been her favorite book. When she left for college, her mother had secretly put it in her suitcase as a surprise and reminder of home. To supplement her income at college, she was taking care of two children while her mother worked in the defense factory.

As she read from the book, her childhood friends came back to her. There was Winne Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, and Roo. It was as if they were just waiting for her return. She would read to the two children, using animated voices for each character, reliving her own past. The children were delighted in the stories of her childhood and the Pooh characters she so lovingly told them about. The one story that delighted them was when Pooh and Piglet decided to build Eeyore a stick house so he could get out of the snow and cold. They were delighted when Christopher found Eeyore and lost his house, from where he had built it. Pooh made up a song about the snow and his cold toes and Piglet sand the part, Tiddley pom. The children laughed when they heard the Tiddley pom part.

Here the dream ends. I never was able to find out how the book ended up on the farm and into the auction.

On that same buying trip, we found two treadle sewing machines, the drawers still full of the sewing supplies. It was as if that women had just closed the drawers for the day and never reopened them again. It was such a fantastic find. My wife would take out one drawer at a time and lovingly go through each item, describing it to me as I drove. I guess the act of describing the items to me triggered another day dream.

I could see an Amish woman, setting in the kitchen, patiently mending her daughter's dress. There were no buttons, just hooks and eyelets. The drawers were full of the everyday sewing items she used. The kitchen was filled with homemade jellies, jams, and canned vegetables. The table was carefully made from rough sawn boards and put together with pegs. Why I knew this, I do not know, but I saw these things very clearly in my mind. We had worked and visited with the Amish on previous trips, and had learned of their unique way of life. It was a simple life, dedicated to God and family. The woman had made all the clothes for her family, working each day to preserve their way of life and gladly sharing her experiences with all. Once again, was I remembering our visits to the Amish or was I experiencing another return to an incident many years ago? I hope it was the latter. I love interacting with people of a bygone era. I never want to lose my unique gift.

While we were in Minnesota we came into a small town that was having an auction/flea market on the town square. The local Catholic Church had contributed a lot of things that had been stored in its basement for years. We were able to purchase a lot of items, including several Saint's metals, different Bibles, and one very old book titled “Ontel Toms Hytte,” in a foreign language, published in 1897. We always buy early editions of just about any book or magazine we find. After bringing it home, I searched the internet and found it to be “Uncle Tom's Cabin,” by Harriet Beecher Stowe. It was written in the Norwegian language. It was a beautiful red, leather bound book, in exceptionally good condition. As I went through it, looking at the pictures, I got that feeling again that I knew all about the books history.

There was a family from Norway that had emigrated to the U.S. in early 1900, to be with family and to start a new life as dairy farmers. One of the treasures they acquired was the book, now known as Uncle Tom's Cabin. They were fascinated by the working conditions in the southern part of the U.S. Coming from a free country and settling in Minnesota, they could not understand the concept of slavery. They also found the book had been banned in the southern states. They took the book to the local Catholic Church, where the priest explained what author Stowe wanted to tell in her book about the working conditions of the slaves and why it was banned in the South.

The Norwegian father gave the book to the priest, who put it in the basement. There it remained until I bought it. Here the vision ended and, once again, I could not bring it up again.

I remember we were set up at a flea market one summer. As the event was starting to close, a man from Montana came over to me wanting to sell a cast iron stove. It was a six hole top, with a hot water warmer on the side. There was a warming oven on top. All the parts were there, nothing I could see was broken or cracked, and it was not rusted very badly. He said he did not want to haul it back to Montana and would sell it very cheap. It had been a long time since we had had one in the store so I bought it and we put it into my trailer. When we returned to the store and as I was unloaded it, ready to clean it up, I got that same feeling that I knew about it. While I cleaned it up, I was living in the past, in Montana, during the 1920's. It was a cold morning and a woman was loading wood into the bottom of the stove. After lighting the wood, she started mixing up biscuit dough for the morning breakfast. The old coffee pot was starting to boil, the smell traveling throughout the house. As the heat started to warm the kitchen, two children came into the room to dress in the warmth of the kitchen. Her husband came in, carrying the morning milk from the cow. It was a scene straight out of the history books. A farm family, getting the day started.

Breakfast consisted of fresh baked biscuits, fresh eggs, sausage, gravy, homemade jam, and fresh milk. After breakfast was over, the day started, with the farmer going to the fields, the kids preparing for their chores in the barn, and the woman starting her work in the house. The fire in the stove burned down, but there was hot water in the side of the stove to wash the morning dishes.

I wish I could say more about the stove and life on that Montana farm, but I was interrupted by a customer wanting some information on something in the store. I never got the feeling of anything about stove again. It was sold to a ranching couple who wanted the protection from switching over from 1999 A.D. to 2000 A.D. And losing all power (of course that did not happen.)

Another such story was an old apron my wife had bought in an auction. It appeared to be made from a flour sack. Flour sacks, in the 1940's, always had pretty prints that could be used in sewing dresses, shirts, baby clothes and aprons. My wife had washed the apron and I was folding it when the dream started.

I was in Dallas, Texas in a warm kitchen, a heavyset woman was cooking on a gas stove. Sweat was running down her face. She picked up the bottom of the apron, wiped her face and continued cooking. A small child came running into the kitchen, crying because she was fallen and hurt herself. The woman opened her arms and enfolded the child into her arms and the apron, talking gently to her and drying her tears on the apron. As the child left, going to play once more, the woman used the bottom of her apron to lift a hot pan off the fire. I had seen both of my grandmother's do the same thing many times over the years. I do not never remember them being in the kitchen without the apron on.

It always amazes me the ingenuity people have when it is necessary. When we would go to an auction, if there were homemade devices we would always try to buy those items. Two such items were a homemade scrub board and flat whisk made from a fly swatter. I still have the whisk, but I cannot find the scrub board from all the ones we still have. I am sure there are stores on the scrub boards we saved, but I have never had any preview when I

hold them. The whisk is a different story. I got the feeling of a woman, in the early 1900's, in a kitchen, during the hard days of the dust bowl, using this whisk to make a little joy during hard times. Her husband had taken an old fly swatter, bent it into shape and then braided thin wire in the middle to make the whisk he could not afford to buy. I got the feeling she used this for a very long time.

The wash board I spoke of earlier had been made from old lumber, fashioned into an acceptable wash board. He had hammered thick field wire into the board in rows and bent the wires around the back. It served the same purpose as a store bought scrub board.

One of the grandmothers, who lived in Dallas, washed clothes on Mondays. She would bring the square tubbed washing machine in the kitchen, setting three square tubs around the washer. Even though the machine had an agitator, she would use a scrub board on the really dirty clothes. She used a stick to pick up the washed clothes out of the soapy water, feed them into the wringer and guide them into the first rinse water. Is this where I get the dreams of the wash board and beater? I really do not know.

I wish I could say I could call up these visions anytime I wanted, but they just come at the least expected times. I would love to know the history of so many items we had in the store. I know each would have a story behind it, some dramatic, some warm and fuzzy, and some would be just ho-hum.

There was one item in my wife's side of the store that opened another story. There was a spatula hanging from the ceiling that caught my attention one day. It had been there a long while, but on this particular day, this item just opened up to me. It was an ordinary kitchen spatula, but the story just needed to be told. It seems it was made in Utica, N.Y. and was bought in a small village store in Garden City, Kansas, by a widow woman that ran a boarding house for single men. She rented out rooms and cooked every meal for them. The spatula was used everyday for food preparation, as well as a swat for little hands that tried to sneak a cookie. That is as far as the vision would take me. We bought it from an antique store in Garden City. I have often wondered what happened to the single mother. Hopefully, she married and had a wonderful rest of her life.

Our grandson was playing with a set of Tonka toys that belonged to my wife's son when he was a little boy. There was a dump truck, a bulldozer, road grader and a crane. I picked up the bulldozer to put the rubber tracks back down when I got another vision. The Tonka Road Builder set was produced in Mound, Minnesota in 1961. It was an all metal set, meant to last for years. I saw my now stepson, in the dirt, on his knees, using the bulldozer to build a road. The crane was picking up dirt and putting it in the dump truck. Then it was gone and I was still holding the toy in my hand and my grandson was asking if I was okay. How do I explain my visions to a six year old boy? I just handed the toy back and said I had fallen asleep.

Not all my visions were concerned with objects. Several years ago, I was called upon to offer the dedicatory prayer for the opening of a new medical clinic in my hometown. Part of the celebration decorations were pictures from the past history of the town. On such picture was of the first Air Mail service to our local post office. It was an early Ford Tri Motor airplane on an airline owned by Earl P. Halliburton. My father had worked in Duncan, Oklahoma, for Halliburton as a machinist in the mid 1930's and knew Mr. Halliburton. Mr. Halliburton was a visionary and knew the airline industry was going to be a thing of the future. I could see the airplane in Oklahoma, its pilot setting at the controls, getting mail from a distribution point, getting ready to deliver the air mail to all points south and west. His stop in out town made history, as it was a first for us. I could see all the dignitaries and locals coming, not only because of the mail, but because very few had seen an airplane up close. The pilot let a few of the people see inside, and then asked them to stand back, started all three motors and roared down the runway, toward his next stop. All this took only a few minutes, because I brought back to the present and was called upon to do the prayer.

My wife loves to display some the old things she collects. Our home is filled with flat-wick lamps, glassware, small objects she has found, and old Christmas items. Outside she has several old wagon wheel rims, an old horse collar, and a complete wooden wheel, leaning on a porch pillar. The wagon wheel is in a state of disrepair, spokes falling out, hub sagging and the felloes wired to the rim. Only one, while I sat on the porch, I could feel another picture coming on. I was back in Shipshewana, Indiana, in 1889, at an Amish wheelwright shop, watching the bearded man making four wagon wheels. He very carefully sawed out the felloes for the rim, the spokes, and four hubs. They were all made from Hickory and fitted with care in a 54 inch circle. He then heated the metal rim, carefully laying it around the felloes and then cooling it down with water before the hot metal could burn the wood. The wheels went onto a covered wagon going to Texas, by way of St. Louis, Mo.

The wagon held all the possessions of a family of five. The four month long trip was hard and unfriendly for the family, but they arrived in Nacogdoches, Texas, the jumping off point for the western part of the Wild West. Here I lost the vision of the family, but we bought the old wagon wheel in an auction in East Texas. Since we bought it in East Texas, I assume they never left that part of the state. What happened to the family and the wagon, is lost in history.

One last story. I am on the Board of Directors of our local WWII and Korea museum and often work with the nine airplanes we have displayed. On one such occasion, I was working with an AT11 bomber/trainer. During the second World War, the AT-11 was used to train bombardiers. I saw myself setting in front of the nose, looking through the Norden Bombsight, aiming at a small target 10,000 feet below. I pressed the “bombs away” button and watched the practice bombs falling toward the Earth. I was then returned to the present, not knowing how well I did. I just know there were over 9,000 bombardiers trained at this field.

As I get older, these visions are coming further and further apart. They have never been a curse to me, but a source of wonder. I have never met another person that had these abilities, but am sure I am not the only one. I am missing the opportunity to know a little more about early history and the lives of people in a more distant time through objects I have collected. It has been an adventure all my life to see these things. Were they my imagination or was I really transported back in time? I don't really know, but I like to think I was really there.