When I was nine, my dad warned me about the dangers of dreaming.
“You know, it’s like if you drink too much water, it shuts down the electrical connections and you just keel on over,” he’d said in his woodchip voice as we sat at the kitchen table.
“Your body forgets how to breathe. Same with dreaming—you get too high in them dreams, there ain’t enough oxygen.”
I had made the mistake of telling him I wanted to be an explorer that day, after Mrs. Hastings showed us a National Geographic article about the Galapagos Islands. I was too young to know about brain synapses and what electricity had to do with any of it so I’d just nodded. My father had cupped my cheeks in his dry, cracked hands, and left to tend the chickens.
I didn’t blame him. He’d wanted to be a mechanic as a young boy. But his mom got sick, bills came due, and his dreams lost the oxygen needed to keep on. Perhaps the electricity too.
Maybe that was why he’d never been able to see the valley of dreams.
I lay in that valley now, amused by the flowing and frolicking nature of these benign aberrations.
I’d known it forever, this expanse of long, swaying grass, sprawling for miles until being taken in by the Catskills. It was a sight to behold—nature as it was designed, free from humans save for the touch of a barn and a withering fence in the distance.
The barn was of course not a barn at all, but a home. It was where I had grown up, except for a short stint at Binghamton University. It was my parent’s farm, but its day to day operations were mine now.
I could see the dreams drifting along the valley–gusts of green and squalls of scarlet scheming to take me away. If only for just a short while.
It’s possible I’m crazy. I’ve considered this before.
I did bring an old girlfriend once—had her sit under the gnarled weeping beech tree with me. But Madeline did not see the colorful clouds that meandered around me with scenes of game-winning shots and yuletide festivities—she saw nothing but a normal field. A beautiful field she had assured me, but nothing strange.
I had thought she might see her dreams, and I can never be sure she didn’t I suppose, but, like my father, her eyes didn’t seem to light up like you would imagine when witnessing your desires as figments and flashes floating in the air. If she did see anything, she never told me, and then we broke up, and she never told me anything after that.
But unlike Madeline, I saw the dreams and the dreams seemed to see me.
Now I was thirty-eight, still single, and I knew the rhythm of a day. It was Wednesday, which meant by sunrise I’d completed all farm tasks in need of my attention.
Free for a spell, I’d come to the valley where dreams wandered.
With the wind mellow and lazy, it allowed the dreams that drifted my way to linger, letting me settle into them before they moved on to wherever else they had to be.
I saw a particularly large one drifting—a cloud the color of an ocean sunset. Pink and puffy, and gliding down a draft of air like a child on a waterslide. It slid along before engulfing me in its mist.
This was a road-not-traveled dream. Well, they all were really. I witnessed a scene of myself and Ella Feldman, sitting on a couch, watching TV together. It looked vaguely like my parent’s house but with slight alterations—many horse statues abound and lace curtains. This was of course because when I had had a crush on Ella, back in third grade, she had a major obsession with horses. She probably still did, but I wouldn’t know because we had drifted apart freshman year of high school. She’d stuck around the area, but she was married now and had two children.
But in this dream, it was us who’d landed happily together. I watched as a version of myself kissed her on the forehead. A border collie jumped on the sofa and tried to cuddle in between our legs. We both laughed at the adorable inconvenience, letting the dog join us.
A life, if perhaps I’d had the nerve to ask her to prom, or ask her to get drinks that one summer. But now it was just a could’ve-been, ambling aimlessly in the air.
I gave a wave of my hands, having seen enough, and the pink puff moved on, in search of I’m not sure what. Maybe it would just slowly pull apart until this possibility was nothing at all. I never watched them that long.
I leaned back now on the moss, as the wind seemed to be picking up, tousling my hair a bit too wildly. I lifted my mud-crusted hat, pushed my hair into it tightly, before dreams of the Galapagos found me.
As my rusting red pick-up truck sputtered to life and I prepared to leave the valley behind, I pondered a couple numbers tucked away in my dented Motorola flip phone. A few even worthy of a drink request this weekend, before they too became nothing more than a wisp in the valley.
Andrew M Jaromin is a writer by night who masquerades as a 5th grade ELA teacher by day. He lived in Philadelphia for seven years, working in the inner-city before recently relocating to Barre, Vermont. In Philly, he was often published in his local paper, The NWLocal. When Andrew is not writing, you can likely find him with his wife and son searching for the cutest, quaintest small town to have a coffee in, or outside, reading a book in a hammock.
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