A lot of my dream locations seem to have been cemented when I was a child of no more than 6, and had only the barest grasp of where things were.
We moved to Montpelier, VT when I was 5. Before that, we lived in Barre (6 or 7 miles away). Both of the towns, when I dream of them, are the towns distorted by my childhood, which is funny to see since I still live here.
In my dream Barre, there is a volcano - an active one - right up on the hill behind the Barre Granite Works as you’re driving into town. The town is mostly dangerously steep hills and sharp-sided valleys, with dark and tangled wilderness along the side of many roads. Most of the houses are Victorians, painted brown or yellow or green - always earth tones. They are very tall, 3 or 4 stories, and they seem to be oddly wider at the top and bottom than at the middle. There are a lot of wrought iron porches and there is usually no one around anywhere. They’re all gone to work, and the town is empty and echoing, except in the wilderness areas, where you can hear things moving. Dark things.
My dream Montpelier is closer to reality, but there are some strange twists and shifts in it. In the real town, there is a big hill that goes up to Vermont College, and another across town that goes up to Hubbard Park, which is a wilderness park. In my dreams, both hills go up to the Park.
The sidewalks on Main Street are still the narrow ones that were there when I moved to the town, not the wider ones that they put in 20 years or so ago. Most of the stores are closed to me. They’re there, and open, but I just know that I’m not supposed to go in, so I don’t.
In my childhood house, the rooms are all bigger, like they first looked to me after living in a very tiny house with too many people and too much stuff, an apartment and a trailer before then. And in the basement of the house is a secret.
You can’t tell the grownups, because they would just never let you go there again, but in the cellar, in the back is a narrow crack in the foundation. If you squeeze through, you’ll find yourself in a kitchen, huge and floored with slick black and white tiles. If you go from there, you can go through some normal house rooms, but then you find the real reason that the place was built.
Opening a heavy wooden door, you find a wide stone staircase leading down about a flight. There are lion statues at the head and the foot of the stairs. From there, it opens out to a vast, vast room that doesn’t echo at all - in a very spooky way. Set into the walls of the room are doors and doorways and flights of stairs of every sort. There are wonderful treasures of all kinds to find, and unlimited rooms to do it in, but there is also a dry, dark, menacing feeling over the whole of it. You can tell it’s dangerous, terrifyingly mind-shyingly dangerous, but right now it’s sleeping.
There’s only one rule about this wonderful place. Out of all the things that you find, you can only keep one.
I can remember waking up from one of these dreams when I was 16. I had found something, something wonderful, and when I realized it was just a dream I actually cried until I cried myself back to sleep.
There is also a beach that I used to dream about a lot when I was a kid, though not lately. The beach itself is made of hard slate-like rock slivers and chunks. The water has enough of a tide to make little waves to lap on the shore, and goes as far as I can see.
Behind me are two mountains close together, fairly sharp and steep, then off to the right, another peak that is even sharper that touches them at the base. The sun sets exactly in between the two close peaks, and it’s always almost sunset in the dream. There aren’t any roads, cabins, boats, or any sign of habitation. Just a desolate rock beach and the sun slowly turning the brown and green mountains red with light. I’ve been having this particular place-dream a long time. My mom has pictures that I made of it when I was 2 or 3 years old in my baby book. I’ve never seen anything even remotely like it that I can remember.
