Last night a tornado dream, the one I posted about on January 4th, came true. We had five earthquakes in Carrollton, Texas. Of course, none of the epicenters were in Carrollton. They were a few miles away in Irving, Texas. But tornado dreams always precede some sort of disaster, usually a personal tragedy. I realized during the final pair of shakes around 8:15 last nigh that the dream truly was about the earthquakes. Remember, we were looking out the south windows of the farm house, my mother and I, at the funnel cloud, and the south windows are located right next to the storm cellar. The storm cellar is safety. It has symbolized safety in my mind since the night we spent in the basement in Rowan, Iowa when the tornado ripped the shingles off the roof of our house. We were safe that night, and we were safe last night because none of the earthquakes were worse than a 3.6 on the Richter Scale. Earthquakes that are that mild do little or no damage. My mother was in the tornado dream because she heard about the earthquakes on the news she was watching up in Iowa (at the same farm place where the dream was set),and she emailed me about the earthquakes to make certain my family and I were safe. So it was another dream of future events, and it did come true… at least in my goofy little mind.
Dreams come true in more than one way. I finished the initial edit of my contest novel, The Magical Miss Morgan. I now believe firmly that it is the best novel I have yet written. It is short. At 44,500 words it is barely more than the minimum acceptable word-count for the contest. It is simple. The main plot is about Francis Morgan having her notions of what constitutes good teaching tested by a parent, a school board member, and an angry principal. The first subplot is about a group of fairies who recruit Francis to help them save the fairy kingdom of Tellosia from a lack of the vital belief in fairies necessary to overcome evil. The second subplot is about one of her favorite students undergoing an attack on her belief in herself from another student. Main plot and two subplots are almost too few for me and my fevered, fertile comic imagination. I can’t seem to juggle (usually) without twenty balls in the air at once. But the simplicity of this novel is one of its main charms, and a quality I am hoping may help win the writing contest. I know from my experiences with the novel Snow Babies that I am not far from reaching the top in a writing contest.
The dream may also have signaled an important milestone in my continuing health problems. I ruled out the things that are most likely to kill me in my recent cardiologist quest. I do not have heart problems after all. I only have six incurable diseases, and am still a cancer survivor (the growth removed from the back of my head was infected, but not cancerous. I only have diabetes, arthritis, hypertension, COPD, psoriasis, and an enlarged prostate. Nothing is bad enough by itself to be unmanageable and deadly). So I am probably going to be alive for a few more years and able to draw and write more. I was forced to retire from teaching by health problems, but now that I am managing my debt with help from a lawyer and do not have the stress from a job, I actually have fewer sick days, more money to spend, and enough time to do the artistic work that I have always wanted to do.
So I close with the Disney song in my head… “A dream is a wish your heart makes… and dreams really do come true.”
