Time Capsule

What an awesome dream I had last night!

Though it has mostly faded by now, the main parts were so emotionally loaded and dynamically vivid that this is one I won’t forget for a long time, if at all.

In the dream, I revisit the backyard of my childhood home.  In real life, my brother and I buried a small box – maybe a quarter of the size of an average shoebox – containing some game pieces, a few toy soldiers, and a note, where our swingset used to be.  In the dream, I am back nearly forty years later to dig it up, particularly interested in what the note says.

The people who are in the dream with me, back to my dreamland childhood backyard, are skeptical.  I spot a tree that was but a sapling when I was kid.  “There’s a medal embedded in there, put there by me!” I say, and, sure enough, there is some sort of religious medallion peeking through years of bark.  We commence the dig.

Well, it turns out I’m in it for the long haul.  I excavate a hole six feet down and discover the box, much larger in my dream.  In it are Stratego pieces and page after page of cryptic, handwritten (possibly coded) notes.  What a find!  Soon the entire backyard is crisscrossed with World War I-like trenches, and every twist and bend finds another time capsule I’ve buried.  Some contain jewels, others toys from my youth.  I have an intense feeling that Answers to Big Questions have to be buried somewhere back here, so I keep on digging.  Fortunately, in dreamland, the dirt is light and I don’t tire at all.

Then I discover something funny.  Just beyond six feet down is a layer of bricks.  Puzzling.  What’s underneath it?  A 1950s-style fallout shelter or a tomb are the two immediate thoughts I dream.  These bricks prove very tough to break through with my shovel.  Fortunately, there are some heavy duty yellow backhoe thingies parked around, and in no time the bricks are pulled up, revealing remarkably preserved 2x4s.  Prying one up, suddenly –

Sunlight comes beaming up from the ground.

Hmm.  I run out to the front yard, run around to a side street, and see that my childhood home and backyard are tilted at a 45-degree angle, kinda like bleachers in a baseball stadium.  The sunlight is leaking up from the ground that way.

While doing so, I come across a famous actor – can’t recall who it is now.  It seems his family owned the house in the late 80s, after we sold it and while he was still a kid.  He buried treasure in the backyard too, and has that same nagging feeling that Answers to Big Questions are buried there.  He’s got quite a lot more financial resources to back him up, being successful in Hollywood and all, than I do.  But we recognize each other as brothers in the faith, and vow to let each one know if anything significant is discovered.

Then the dream morphed into where I’m looking at a poster of my old band, advertising a gig down the shore.  From there, it segues into that apocalyptic desert wasteland I’ve been dreaming about of old …

But man, that backyard dream was soooooooo realistic, I didn’t want it to end!