A Night Dream Visit
by Eric Stirnemann
Almost all night or early morning dreams we experience are merely mixed-up and meddlesome thoughts increased in power to dream strength, which we experience out of our memory. We always have an enormous number of memories piled up.
These dreams might be mixed-up or crazy thoughts just naturally becoming active. Most are worthless effusions. I believe a good and healthy dream is very much better. Higher visions may be supernatural inspirations whose origins are hard to define. In the numerous varieties and complications possible, we are confronted with multiple problems.
One night initiated a number of situations whose origin few people ever experience or suspect. They were very orderly situations. But real astral traveling is not like the type of dream described above; it is of more direct action. This type of dream, described as follows, happened only once in my life.
My dream was clear and very beautiful. I was driving my green Mercedes diesel car along a mountain road high up near a ridge after a rain. The road had a few wet potholes but was easily passable. I observed a faraway mountain ridge across the valley. All areas were deeply forested. It reminded me of the Feather River Canyon in California, but the dream did not show the enormous and very involved Feather River valley. My sister was in the rear seat of the car, and my driving was as realistic as that in the outside world.
After a long drive, we reached the top of the valley at a point where three medium-sized brooks converged and the landscape opened up into far-reaching grasslands. Also, some woods were visible in the distance. I had to cross a roughly built wooden bridge at the river, and I feared it might not hold up my car, which weighed more than four thousand pounds. The bridge had no side protection except rafters along its sides.
In the distance appeared an older house to the right. Beyond that was a long warehouse and then a few stores farther down the street.
Here now is where the story really starts. I was suddenly afraid I might run out of diesel oil, which I was usually anxious about after long drives. I stopped at the first house to inquire about diesel oil or a gasoline station. The house was of an older California style, a high pyramid-like roof, a porch or deck along its front with two windows and an open double door in the center. An elderly lady in a plain dress stepped down the six or seven steps, which had no railings. I left the car, walked around it, and asked where I could find a diesel oil station.
The elderly woman looked puzzled but said nothing. She pointed her right arm with a friendly gesture toward the shopping area and a railroad station beyond. Then she turned around, walked quietly up the steps into her door—and disappeared suddenly at that spot. I did not see her step inside.
Chagrined a little, I drove into the shopping area slowly past the warehouse. People were standing around. I stopped in front of the grocery store. Next to the grocery store was a well-marked saloon, which was closed, and next to that an empty store with bare windows, also closed. At the corner, a well-graded road ran beside the building, and farther down a house was visible on the left.
The owner of the grocery store came out in his white apron and down a step or two and listened to my questioning. He stood there in his shirt-sleeves, but he said nothing at all. I thought I saw other people nearby. They came and went quiet like, sort of appearing and disappearing unexpectedly.
By this time, I was almost frantic trying to find a gas station when I heard a train toot in the far distance on my left. Its familiar toot-toot-to-toot was so realistic that I thought it was wonderful to see civilized machinery.
People acted as strangers would, and we went up a short slope, my sister in her wheelchair, to the depot area. The station was new and had no name up as yet. The tracks were lined with wooden boards at the passenger unloading side along the rails. The train rumbling and rolling into the passenger track was composed of a period baggage car and two coach cars, an early Baldwin locomotive up front, the proud engineer in his cabin. The train’s whistle was not very quiet, either. This type of locomotive was familiar to me because of my long-time model railroad experience.
Now it was clear to me. I had arrived in an early nineteenth-century village someplace in America. People were dressed according to that era of history. Among other people, a well-dressed woman stepped out of a coach with two happy children. She left the depot area with the children running. She was wearing a new dress and a fancy hat decorated with a small, brilliantly colored stuffed bird. She and others walked away and, it seemed to me, disappeared a short distance away.
A few people boarded the train then, and the noise of it leaving the depot was so real, actually fantastically real, that I was very touched to hear and see it. It rolled away toward a low mountain range in the distance, and I thought it was on the way to California.
One puzzling fact in the dream upset me. I did not know or realize at that time of life that we cannot talk normally in heaven without an earth body. Although the train noises were real, even wonderful to hear, talking seemed nonexistent. And the fact that no gasoline station or diesel pump was available worried me no end!
We looked around the depot. It had its peculiarities. My father was a station master when I was six years old and I knew about these establishments. The building stood a bit to the left. We tried to circumvent it in order to look on the farther side at the landscape beyond. Passing through, there was a cage on our right made of chicken wire and lattice supports in which some baggage was visible. Everything seemed to be brand new, and we thought it was a temporary storage place. However, when we tried to pass through it, the exit on that side of the building was closed. Then I looked for the usual freight unloading ramp and the freight room. To my surprise there was none of that. We moved to the left around the seemingly newly constructed building past an entrance door. I wondered what would be inside, because no ticket office window was visible anywhere. Who would need tickets or baggage in heaven, I later wondered.
The fact that it held no name increased my irritation. I had many questions on my mind. People who were nearby hardly came near us now.
I saw a crowd of nice people gathering a distance away, about fifteen people, all watching us intently. As I approached them, I grew anxious to know the name of the village. I harangued them and scolded them to please tell me the name of the village. I wanted to know that name so seriously, I looked a bit mad, I am sure, upset as I was.
I felt some people in the small crowd did not like my attitude, and five people disappeared one after the other. Then a few more curiosity seekers arrived instantly.
And now it happened. I stepped near and asked again: “What is the name of your village?” (I did not know then I could not talk without a body—it must have been dream talk!)
But they just stood around, somewhat interested. A man with a mustache, who looked familiar to me, finally came forward and said simply and understandably, as if blowing the word through his lips: “Goodville.”
I had no idea who this man was. He spoke just that one word, and he had a difficult time saying it. Then I had had enough of the turn-of-the-century village adventure and its silent people. We walked over to the car and were home in bed in a second or a fraction thereof.
I knew after this dream that I had been in the world of the Beyond of earth life in a village with people who lived around or before the turn of the nineteenth century. Everything looked very real in this dream, however, and a lot more could be said. I sensed a lesson for the first time in my life. It concerned the manner and conditions of life of people who had departed and were living on the other side.
As I said before, daily or everyday communication without our earthly mouths and lips and voices that we use here is difficult over there unless thought transference is applied. These people might even have sympathetic feelings, and all noises heard are in the mind. They live and behave as people in their historical age lived and acted, and they observe a singular life of their own. I noticed that same phenomenon in another dream many years later.
I should mention, too, that my sister who was with me in this car-traveling dream knew nothing of it. She was at home in bed.
Strangely enough, eventually it dawned on me who the familiar man was who said, “Goodville.” I do not know why it took so long to understand that it was my Uncle August, my mother’s older brother born before 1880. He smiled at me in the hereafter as he always did and seemed very happy there. Today, I feel sorry my conversation with him was so limited.
I still think of that mysterious building which was closed and had no name.
The more I think of it, the stranger it feels. It is a puzzle unsolved by me!
