Truth is Stranger than Fiction

I have no trouble identifying the various disguises that the “classic” anxiety dream can present itself in. The human mind is an amazing thing. It has been no surprise to me that the latest way anxiety is expressed in my dreams has everything to do with construction. So, while it was bit different from the others, I paid little attention to the last dream before waking on Tuesday morning.

            The alarm went off and I woke at the end…well it had to be the end since I was awake…of yet another construction dream. I had dreamt that the crew working in front of the new church had unearthed some bones. The idea that they might be human had them pretty spooked. I went to see and pulled something that looked like a shoulder out of a pile of dirt. But when I examined it more closely, while still looking like a bone, it had tree bark on it. It was not a bone. And I explained that “The ‘old cemetery’ has not been there” but rather back toward the corner of the building on the alley side. I knew this absolutely, of course, like you often know things in dreams. Right then, the workers off to the side dug up an intact coffin. It was sitting on top of the ground partially open. When I got closer, I saw that inside there was he body of a woman. Then the alarm ended the dream.

            I did not give the dream another thought as the day began.

            That afternoon Father Gus and I traveled to

Forest

City

to express our sympathy to Father John Polednak on the death of his mother. The going and the coming occupied the entire afternoon and I did not get back to

Milford

until after quitting time for the construction workers.

            On Wednesday afternoon about

2:30

I left the office and headed toward the rectory. On the way, I met Harold, the construction supervisor. After a bit of business, he said that I had “missed all the excitement on Tuesday afternoon.”

            Apparently, Gary Williams, the chief of police, and Chris Brighton, the assistant coroner, has been called to the site. Work had come to a grinding halt because while digging some men had unearthed what appeared to be bones! They needed to verify that they were not human bones before any work could continue.

            Obviously it was decided the bones were not human. But they were near the area that I was so sure was the site of the “old cemetery” in my dream.