Root Beer Dreams: Part I

This week I was canning tomatoes. I have written about canning tomatoes before, as have others with far greater expertise. So happy though it makes me to contemplate my row of jars, I find I don't have much more to say on the topic, at least for the moment. It is always a pretty big project, and I have no intention of doing much else at the stove until it's done. It appears, however, that I am unable to keep quiet, all the same. So I thought I'd tell you about my recurring root beer dreams.

Other people's dreams are famously boring. You can, of course, skip this bit, and I won't be surprised or offended. Personally, though, I often find dreams more interesting than the dreamers, if that makes any sense. By dreams, I mean real, while-you-sleep dreams, as opposed to fantasies. Lots of folks seem to have sadly boring (at least to others) conscious fantasies. (Presumably, they do not themselves find them boring-or they wouldn't bother to concoct them.)

I am almost always intrigued by real dreams, though, including my own. I have been amazed by how distinctive and original an ordinary person's dreams may be. It is cheering to think that people in general may have more potential to delight and astonish than is immediately apparent. Unlike some, I am generally pleased when anyone (who seems neither insane nor predatory) offers to tell me about the odd dream they had last night.

For about a year, some time ago, I kept a notebook by my bed, and wrote down all I remembered of my own dreams, right away, when I woke up. This is a fairly common exercise. If you have never done it, you might like to give it a try. You get a ton more detail than anything you might remember as the day rolls on. Sometimes, when you reread there are cool surprises- for example, wonderful (or terrible) puns- often revealing. Eventually I stopped doing this...It required getting up 15 minutes earlier than normal , and anyway, I had accumulated a bookful of dreams to mull over.

This self indulgent rambling is intended to explain why I have the following precise recorded version of my first, long ago root beer dream. I still have this dream sometimes, and it doesn't seem to vary much. After all this carrying on and justifying, I must admit that my root beer dream is not especially astonishing. In fact, it is probably precisely the sort of dream people have in mind when they say they could not be less interested. I am, nonetheless, attached to it. While far from amazing, it is a little weird, and has had two odd side effects. This is the dream:

I am in a little wooden shack/shop, which is actually some way in to a dark woods, off a dirt road. It is very hot out, though cooler in the woods than on the road. I am about 9 years old. The shop is very empty, dark, possibly deserted, dusty; it is overgrown with foliage. The wood is a little like a fairy tale, and a little like a real forest. It's cooler in the building than outside in the woods. Everything in the shop is old-shelves and stacks of food with old fashioned labels, and so on. The cash register is an antique type, very ornate, with the sort of keys that stick up on stalks.

There is a ceiling fan going and a big chest cooler, plugged in and humming, in the corner. I open it and it is full of frosty bottles of root beer. You have to put money in the cooler to slide a bottle out...a dime (!). I don't have a dime. I also don't have shoes. I'm a bit raggedly, altogether.

A grownup comes in, he looks dusty, too. He has a bicycle outside with a wire basket on it, and he buys most of the root beer from the cooler. Plenty of dimes. He opens one with the can opener on the side of the cooler, and offers it to me. It is some kind of homemade root beer; it has a label stuck on it with the writing in pencil. The root beer is all icy cold and tastes incredibly, amazingly good. There are fishing poles and a box of lures and stuff on the counter, and the guy picks it all up and hands most of it to me. He says that the root beer will be "good with the fish," and that we'd better get going. He puts the rest of the bottles in the basket on the bike, and gets on it. I climb on the back, and we ride off, with me hanging on to the fishing gear.

I have no idea who this guy is. He has clearly mistaken me for someone else. I'm going along in part for the fishing, but mostly for the root beer, I think. The root beer is delicious and different -and I have, (after waking), a strong sensory memory of the taste. We ride off down the dirt road. End dream.

Avoiding interpretation, lurid or otherwise, these are the two side effects of my dream: First, I felt compelled to make a collage of it, back when it made its first appearance. The collage was semi-successful, in that it looks alot like the dream. However, it also looks a little sinister, and the dream doesn't feel scary at all. (I was especially pleased with the look of a reflection of the branch in the "window"-in case you didn't notice.) The other effect is that I have, ever since, had a real yen to make some homemade root beer, and to try to duplicate the great dream taste. ( You see, there is a food connection here, after all. You just have to be incredibly patient with my digressive yammering to get to it. ) Told you it was weird.

When I began looking into it, I discovered that it was a pretty complicated deal to make root beer. with ramifications, including the unwelcome possibility of poisonousness. However, very soon, I intend to give it a try- and I will tell you all about it.

Comments

[anapestic]

I think root beer is one of the few areas where I'd have a lot more fun looking for the best root beer that someone else had made rather than making it myself. I have had a great time making various potent potables, but anything without a lot of alcohol in it scares me a bit from a spoilage standpoint. But I'll be eager to see what you come up with.

[Melissa]

I don't think I've ever had that kind of recurring dream. Certainly not one that detailed and specific, with the same scenario played out again and again. I wonder what in your subconscious is so attached to the idea of old-fashioned root beer? And will the dreams cease when you finally make a root beer as delicious as you've dreamed??

[pyewacket]

Making root beer also involves possible explosions. To which, if you're like me, you think, fun! But maybe the more normal folk would disagree.

I love dreams, too: my own, other people's. I'm wondering something. When you say you're 9 years old in the dream, do you find yourself disoriented as to your age when you wake? Usually, I am my own age in dreams, but in the last year or two, I've started having dreams in which I am ten or fifteen or twenty, and when I wake, I have to sort of drag myself back through the years, remembering quickly: no, I DID graduate, then I got married and divorced, and I moved back here, and I have a job and I'm at least thirty - yes, I'm thirty four! In just a few seconds, I've gone from fifteen to thirty-four. Which is disconcerting, but not too bad. But I fear for the future. Will someday I wake from dreams of being ten years old to remember that my life has nearly passed and I am eighty-five? Will I be relieved or devastated?

I never dream about food, strangely. My dreams are strongest in their impressions of places. I dream often of a green open land that comes to the ocean in cliffs. In my dreams, it's always Maine (a place I love), but it looks more like Ireland. I've tried to paint it and failed. Maybe I should try a collage.

Do you have lucid dreams? Have you ever tried to induce them?

[lindy]

anapestic- Actually, you have hit on part II of my Plan. In an attempt to get some idea of the ingredients for the dream taste-I thought I'd do some sort of sampling of commercial root beers to to hone in. I have hardly begun the roundup, though-it could take a while. I may get some friends to participate, for a range of opinions.
Melissa-This is the only dream I've had where food is so central, though I've had other dreams in which I was cooking. I would never have remember it so specifically if I hadn't written it down. I too wonder if it will vanish...
pyewacket-yes, isn't the age thing strange? I've been having a lot of college age dreams lately, set in various imaginary and combination universities. I do find some confusion on waking. I thought it was primarily wishful thinking. I have yet to have a law school dream, which would tend to support that theory!
Try the collage- I do think they are especially good for capturing dreams-I made several more around the same time. They are a bit of a pain, though,in that you have to save tons of scraps to have anything to work with...takes a lot of storage..messy, but fun. Like exploding bottles of root beer.
Do you dream intentionally? I do sometimes go back to sleep and try to grab one where it was interrupted- doesn't usually work out.

[pyewacket]

Sorry this is getting so off-topic, but what sort of scraps do you use? I have done a little collage, but always had trouble with finding one-sided images that were on thin enough paper - one-sided so the opposite side image didn't bleed, thin so that the collage merged well.

I do choose to dream, or to continue dreams, and am sometimes successful. I've been trying the various techniques to induce lucid dreams on and off for the last year or so, but have only had one that I actually caused. I haven't been very disciplined, though. I love lucid dreams, particularly when I realize that I'm dreaming and then get to choose to fly. But making it happen involves all of this practice that feels very silly - you ask yourself repeatedly during the day whether you're dreaming or not, and you test for dreaming, and then with any luck you get so in the habit that you do it when you're actually dreaming. Bingo, lucidity. It sounds crazy, but I can attest it worked once.

I also keep a dream journal, but only for the most powerful dreams.

[lindy]

pyewacket-I think I'd better send you an email on the collage stuff.

[Julie]

This collage would be wonderful as part of the label for a bottle of root beer.

I think you should start bottling cmmercially just as soon as you find your perfect root beer recipe. (What!? That's a logical next step, isn't it?)

[zp]

Have you read the homemade root beer chapter of, I think, Belles on Their Toes? Cracks me up every time.

[Lynn D.]

I think you are so clever to make a collage of your dream. Aspiring collage makers might enjoy this blog:
http://acollageaday.blogspot.com/
This clever fellow posts a collage a day and sells them for a reasonable price. Another artist paints a small (often food related) picture a day and sells them on e-bay:
http://duanekeiser.blogspot.com/
I found these sites by following links on Lobstersquad's drawing blog.

[lindy]

Julie- I fear that anything I tried to do commercially would a) drive me frantic, and b) ruin my fun. . I've got all of that I can handle with my actual profession. I was born to be an amateur, and will be lucky if I can manage to make a couple of bottles!
zp-no...I didn't know this sequel to Cheaper By the Dozen existed- until I looked it up just now. I'm going to find it, for sure.
Lynn-Thanks, I will definitely check these out.

[Anita]

There is incredible detail to your dream! Maybe because you have 'visited' it often! I enjoy reading your 'yammering', as you call it.

[Julie]

Lindy, this is a wonderful post. I'm someone who a)loves other people's dreams, as well as my own when I have a "good" one -- they're better than movies, b)spends time searching out root and birch beers for G, since they are a passion of his, and c)thinks your collage is just splendid. This post is a feast for the eye as well as the imagination...

[Derek McCrea]

Wonderful paintings, I think I will go and get motivated and try to keep working on my painting a day.
Good luck with the work.

Derek