Day 148: How do you know when a dream is just a dream, and when it’s a whispering from the grave?
When I was little, whenever I had a bad dream, my mom would get me to talk about it. She thought if I got it out of my head I wouldn’t dwell on it. That practice taught me to think about my dreams. Almost always. I wake up and try to decipher what they meant.
That happened in 2008, when I had a dream about two people, with full identities. I wrote down their names, and then spent the next few years dreaming and writing their story until it turned into the four books I published last year. If you’re interested, you can read more about the whole strange process here.
For me, a name in a dream, Riley Graves, led me to write fiction, which led me to research, which led me to find out about my ancestors - my real, far from fictitious ancestors. Did they have something to do with my dream?
Today is Memorial Day, and I couldn't finish my week of MEMORIALS without honoring the people of Eyam in the Derbyshire Dales of England in 1665 and 1666. You see, Eyam may rhyme with dream, but my dream led me to them, and what happened to them was certainly not a dream.
I had been writing Riley's story, off and on, for a couple of years when an email accident caused me to Google his name, and I was stunned to find out that Riley Graves is a PLACE, not just my fictitious character. It fit into his story so perfectly, that it was like another whispering from the grave, leading me in the right direction.
In 1665, In Eyam, the Black Plague arrived with the fleas on some cloth that had been delivered to the town tailor. The people of Eyam VOLUNTARILY quarantined themselves in their town in order to spare their neighboring villages. The 76 families who lived there lost 260 of their family members. It was an unfathomable and incredible sacrifice.
As I wove their story into the ancestry of my characters, another whispering led me to look at my own family tree, and I found that I had relatives living only an hour's walk from Eyam in 1665. Suddenly, their sacrifice felt like it had been made for me, too. Did they save my ancestors' village from the plague? Were my ancestors whispering to me? It's entirely possible.
Three and a half centuries later, the townsfolk of Eyam still honor those ancestors, and now I pay my respects to them, too. They feel like my ancestors.
I don't know if that first dream was whispering all of this to me, or if it was all just a strange coincidence, but it tied me more securely to my ancestors. I'll be forever grateful I woke up and wrote down the name Riley Graves.
If you would like to learn more, click here for photos and links to more.
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