The Dead Dream Boneyard

It was clear there were some bad things stuck in his thought grinder.

It kept grinding out the same bad thoughts over and over, and it was turning his chameleon brain into some sort of cemetery for dead dreams. He even gave it a name: 

“The Dead Dream Boneyard" 

That made him laugh...and creeped him out a little at the same time.

He was spending way too much time visiting his Dead Dream Boneyard, where broken promises stood like crosses marking spots where rows and rows of dreams were laid to rest, one after another, silent forever. Some dreams had lived long and produced days like wonderful blossoming flowers and nights like they write about in love poems, while other dreams had died young and never saw their promise fulfilled.

He wasn't sure which dreams hurt more to visit. 

No one wants to bury a dream. It's a very sad thing but you have to bury a dream when its dead, there is just no getting around it. Someone has to step up and proclaim, "I'm sorry, we did everything we could. The dream is gone." Mourners come once to say their good-byes when dreams die and say things like “What happened?’ and “If you need anything at all...” and then they go away and are thankful their dreams are still around. Everyone knew what killed the dreams but no one wanted to talk about it or accept responsibility for what happened, and everyone just looked the other way and nervously shuffled passed the rows and rows of dead dreams, but not him. 

He would bring thoughts from his thought grinder in bunches like flowers to each dead dream and plant them with prayers of forgiveness and water them with tears of longing while muttering bits of finely crafted stories under his breath that sounded like nonsense but made him feel better about what happened to these dreams. Then he'd dust off the broken promise markers, smoothing off the rough edges no one liked to see, and like rubbing dusty old magic lamps the dead dreams would come to life and start floating by like old photographs hung in puffy white clouds of memory.

To spend time with old dead dreams is to steal time from making new dreams, and he knew that, but still he came to the Dead Dream Boneyard. And when he stayed too long, dreams that were angry they were dead would howl at him on cold bitter winds that made him turn up his collar and head for home, and he would think to himself, "That's it, no more visits to this Dead Dream Boneyard for me. I'm done with this!" But he always went back.

What he needed was something new to go through the thought grinder of his chameleon brain so he could make some new dreams, but it’s hard to think new thoughts and make new dreams when you’ve just left The Dead Dream Boneyard.


Ken Owen   Van Niddy Press   May 2013