May 12, 2000

I had an unusual dream last night... it's also unusual that I remember dreams so well.

I was with someone (a journalist maybe?) who had come to talk to the people who lived in a very old house. It turned out there was a poor single mom and her daughter living there, and they didn't own the place; I'm not sure if they were just squatting there or renting it or what. It also turned out the house was haunted, and this frightened them. There were some noises and stuff going on and they left, so we didn't get to talk to them very long.

Then there was this old gentleman who said that he wanted to go looking for artichokes in the attic. We went up there, and there were a couple of piles of old papers, and some piles of composting leaves and other compost-pile materials. He said "Look, under and around those compost piles, artichokes grow there!" I got the impression that he thought artichokes were a kind of fungus, like mushrooms. I knew he was wrong; artichokes grow on large green plants several feet high, and there wasn't enough space or soil or light in the attic for that.

I was digging around in one of the piles of old papers, and was more interested in what I found there than the artichokes (we didn't find any of those). At the bottom, there were some wet papers that all seemed to have belonged to one person; I'm not sure now what they were but they were interesting to me. Maybe had something to do with travel (passports and other travel papers). I took them down from the attic and started looking at them on a table downstairs. Then there was an old lady who appeared, a ghost, who said that those papers were hers, and she'd been looking everywhere for them. This conversation continued for a while, and I think there were also other ghosts that the journalist and I were talking to, and the old man kept looking for artichokes up in the attic. After that, as we were getting ready to leave, the other ghosts were gone and it was more apparent that the old man and the old lady to whom the papers belonged had been married. He said "Darn, I guess we are dead now too," with a disappointed look on his face. And I realized for the first time that he was just another of the ghosts hanging out there, who had probably lived in that house long ago. As the journalist and I were leaving, I asked him "so who really lives here?" and he said "That lady and her daughter." And that was the end of the dream. Except that at some point it seems like I was trying to eat a large, somewhat misshapen artichoke, but I'm not sure where that fits in the stream of things.

I suspect this was prompted by some old books I was looking through last night. I inherited them from an old man my mom used to work for, who died a couple years ago and his family was trying to get rid of all his stuff so they could sell the house. Several of the books are apparently college engineering texts from around the turn of the century (copyrights in the late 1800's) but one of them is Town's Analysis of Derivative Words and has several love poems written in various places on the inside covers. Maybe those were autographs by friends of the lady to whom the book belonged. I'm not sure.


The note saying "This book belonged to my mother's youngest sister" appears to be the handwriting of the gentleman from whom I inherited this collection of books. Apparently she died shortly after using this book; what a tragedy. Must have been young and beautiful, judging from the poetry.

I suppose the copyright has long since expired, so I might as well scan the whole book and put it online one of these days.