Odewald
There was a particularly odd dream I had last night. It was one of my 12-hour dreams - the ones that I only get after sleeping 12 hours or more.
My teenage self and an ex-boyfriend were driving around at my suggestion to "waste some time." We ended up in the PA backroads and came across this small rural community. It was in the middle of the woods with very tall, very old trees. All the roads were unpaved and dusty. All the streets were made into circles and wound around groves of very large trees. In fact, it was less a neighborhood than a collection of houses sitting in the forest. We stopped there because these houses were celebrating Halloween. In May.
We got out of the car to walk around and look at the decorations. How odd it was that these people could grow pumpkins in early summer, and so many of them. They grew just as many white pumpkins as orange ones and many of them had carved faces. For some reason the big motif was placing Jack-O-Lanterns on tall sticks and draping bedsheets below the neck, like they used to do in the early 20th century. They also hung them from the trees with the bedsheets drifting in the wind. The branches were still conspicuously empty.
Every few houses were entered into some sort of competition where a live actor had a wide Jack-O-Lantern over his head and was repeating the same pantomime over and over again. One guy connected by a winding sheet kept falling out of a tree again and again. Others just stood on their yard pushing carts of pumpkins back and forth. I got the feeling they were staring at us. Then again, we were the only people on the sidewalk.
Soon, though, the street was overcrowded with children. And yet their costumes were also reminiscent of the sixties Charlie Brown special: they just wore bedsheets with monster masks over their faces. The children didn't laugh or make child-like noises, they just ran from house to house collecting their candy from silent homeowners. It wasn't a noise-less place, but it was devoid of human noise. There was something ritualistic about the place and everything that was going on.
And then the children stood in the street and watched us. We decided to go back to the car. Then the pantomimers took off their plastic heads to reveal they didn't have human heads, but these overlarge sort of pie/Reeses peanut-butter cup-shaped heads with Jack-O-Lantern faces carved in. And most of them were drawn angry. And they chased us.
The lucky thing we discovered was the heads crumbled like crackers if you hit them. We managed to outrun the majority of them - there were a lot more than we thought. We got into the car and drove at breakneck speed around sharp corners to get back to society. And on the way out, we spotted a sign we missed on the drive in.
The sign read: You are now leaving Odewald. Come back soon.
The Weird-Upon-Waking part is: yesterday was my ex's birthday and I didn't think of it until I woke up. This dream also stands out because I could read the sign - I usually can't read or remember conversations in my dreams. I'm also fascinated by recurring dream geography/architecture: I have at least a mall and a riverside district I've been to multiple times in different dreams. It makes me wonder if Odewald is a place I'll return to. And I apparently need to start thinking about Halloween.
My teenage self and an ex-boyfriend were driving around at my suggestion to "waste some time." We ended up in the PA backroads and came across this small rural community. It was in the middle of the woods with very tall, very old trees. All the roads were unpaved and dusty. All the streets were made into circles and wound around groves of very large trees. In fact, it was less a neighborhood than a collection of houses sitting in the forest. We stopped there because these houses were celebrating Halloween. In May.
We got out of the car to walk around and look at the decorations. How odd it was that these people could grow pumpkins in early summer, and so many of them. They grew just as many white pumpkins as orange ones and many of them had carved faces. For some reason the big motif was placing Jack-O-Lanterns on tall sticks and draping bedsheets below the neck, like they used to do in the early 20th century. They also hung them from the trees with the bedsheets drifting in the wind. The branches were still conspicuously empty.
Every few houses were entered into some sort of competition where a live actor had a wide Jack-O-Lantern over his head and was repeating the same pantomime over and over again. One guy connected by a winding sheet kept falling out of a tree again and again. Others just stood on their yard pushing carts of pumpkins back and forth. I got the feeling they were staring at us. Then again, we were the only people on the sidewalk.
Soon, though, the street was overcrowded with children. And yet their costumes were also reminiscent of the sixties Charlie Brown special: they just wore bedsheets with monster masks over their faces. The children didn't laugh or make child-like noises, they just ran from house to house collecting their candy from silent homeowners. It wasn't a noise-less place, but it was devoid of human noise. There was something ritualistic about the place and everything that was going on.
And then the children stood in the street and watched us. We decided to go back to the car. Then the pantomimers took off their plastic heads to reveal they didn't have human heads, but these overlarge sort of pie/Reeses peanut-butter cup-shaped heads with Jack-O-Lantern faces carved in. And most of them were drawn angry. And they chased us.
The lucky thing we discovered was the heads crumbled like crackers if you hit them. We managed to outrun the majority of them - there were a lot more than we thought. We got into the car and drove at breakneck speed around sharp corners to get back to society. And on the way out, we spotted a sign we missed on the drive in.
The sign read: You are now leaving Odewald. Come back soon.
The Weird-Upon-Waking part is: yesterday was my ex's birthday and I didn't think of it until I woke up. This dream also stands out because I could read the sign - I usually can't read or remember conversations in my dreams. I'm also fascinated by recurring dream geography/architecture: I have at least a mall and a riverside district I've been to multiple times in different dreams. It makes me wonder if Odewald is a place I'll return to. And I apparently need to start thinking about Halloween.