Dreams

I had a rather vivid dream last night.  I hopped a bus to a creek on the North side of Springfield and started walking up the creek.  Reaching the first bend, I started searching the creek bed rocks for Indian arrowheads.  My first few finds that looked suspiciously like arrowheads, but I decided they weren’t.  Digging deeper near the bank, I found a trove of treasure.  There were eight to ten knives carved out of rock.  A few were broken, or only partially carved, but many were pristine.  I gathered my finds in my arms and climbed out of the creek.  I stopped quickly to examine some sort of Bob Ross game that had been lying in the creek, but decided the knives were enough and headed back to the bus.

The bus was a self-driving and I was the only person on board.  I laid my ancient knives on a seat and worked on packing them into my backpack.  As the bus worked its way in the general direction of home, though on the far East side of town, other people began to board.  A rider mentioned their stop and it caught my attention. 

“This bus goes all the way to Jacksonville?” I asked. 

She confirmed and I began worrying about which stop would let me out closest to home.  The road names didn’t make sense to me and I was having trouble reading the schedule.  I finally decided there was only one left, which I missed.  I tried to use the ‘Stop’ button beneath my window, but the driverless bus wouldn’t listen and pulled onto the interstate.  A short jumble of exits and turns later and I was awake, safely in my bed without having to walk across town to get home.

It's no surprise I would dream about Indian arrowheads.  I really love old artifacts and fossils.  I have a small collection that includes numerous crinoids, a trilobite, a fish, a piece of dinosaur bone, and a small lump of petrified sloth poop.  Geodes dot my collection, as do other small fossils.

My greatest fossil find was about the size of a coconut.  It was a coiled snake with its head raised, ready to strike.  The detail was amazing, right down to the impending doom written in its beady eyes.  I have no idea how it formed, but it was truly beautiful. 

A few months ago, I sat down at my computer to work.  An hour in, I thought about my new fossil find, deciding I should show it to my wife when she got home.  But where was it?  My brain skipped for just a second, before settling on the unpleasant truth, a truth I literally exclaimed aloud.

“No!  It was a dream!”