INTERPRETING DREAMS & MORE SMALL MIRACLES

In my last post I told you my sisters look askance at my self-proclaimed ability to interpret dreams.  We laugh about it – Lonna reads palms and Myrna interprets dreams – but each of these pursuits has a certain amount of credibility.

I have several friends in Arkansas, where I lived for a few years, who study dream interpretation.  Hearing about things they learned through dreams made me more conscious of my own nocturnal meanderings and messages.  I have come to believe that vivid dreams, the ones that don’t float away unremembered the moment I open my eyes, may contain a message my subconscious is trying to tell me.  Books and web sites about dream interpretation explain a kind of universal meaning behind many of the symbols in people’s dreams. When I mentioned to one of my Arkansas friends that I was tired of working all night doing endless loads of laundry and cleaning dirty, cluttered houses she told me a house or home in your dreams may represent your own self and to think of things in my life that I need to be working on.  I discovered that each time I dreamed of cleaning all night there was some project in my real life that I was neglecting and needed to finish. As I completed a neglected piece of writing, home or craft project, or whatever else I was in the middle of, the dreams of cleaning went away. After one episode of cleaning for several nights in a row I dreamed I had a huge building to work on, starting on the top floor and working my way down.  To my relief every room was immaculate from top to bottom. Apparently, whatever real life project I had neglected was now under control.

The dream about lost packages in Illinois cornfields was so obvious it required no study at all.  We had missed something in that day of searching old records in Quincy. We had to go back and look again.

We started our second day in Quincy, at the Adams County Historical Society where archivist and historian Jean Kay met us at the door.  Jean was our next miracle. Through her guidance and vast knowledge of the history of that area we learned more about our ancestor Elizabeth’s family (those who had not followed the Latter-day Saint church to Utah) than we had been able to find in two years of computer research.  After several hours of work she sent us on our way with pages of photocopied documents and a detailed map to the Franks Cemetery where many of the Tyler family are buried.

Excerpt from Long Journeys:
Through Jean’s guidance we learned that Elizabeth’s children had been a prominent family in the area of Richfield, Illinois, a small community southeast of Quincy.  They were farmers, soldiers, a legislator, storekeepers, and for many years the town postmaster or postmistress, depending on who was running the Tyler store at the time.  One granddaughter, Nathaniel’s daughter Polly Young, was reportedly so “lucky” in her business dealings that others copied her, hoping her luck would rub off on them. Elizabeth’s sons Ira, Urial and Henry served in the Union army during the Civil War.  Ira spent 18 months as a prisoner of the Confederacy.