With New Year bells chiming, some Ballard readers might be thinking of their own mortality. How many years will we amble about in occupied splendored haze thinking about the job, global warming, commerce, Facebook, smartphones, play-dough, and the Seahawks? Some questions are better left unanswered, but dreams may hold some insight.
This may have been the point found in an article called “Peculiar Dream Story” from a March 1913 edition of the Ballard News.
The article cites Horace G. Hutchinson, who reported in Longman’s Magazine that a woman was having dreams of a house. She discovered every detail of the house in her dreams. She told her husband about the house, and it was a “very pleasant fancy” indeed.
However, one day the couple found that same home while perusing the countryside for a summer rental. They pulled up to the home and immediately knew it was the house from her dream. They rented the house for the summer.
Apparently the home had a reputation for ghosts. Before the new tenants, every one was afraid of the house and the ghosts within.
“Had these new tenants not brought their own old servants with them, it’s likely that they would have had some difficulty in whipping up a domestic staff, ” the article stated.
It was reported that they finished the summer with no paranormal incident, but were disappointed because they had not seen the apparitions that the home had a reputation for.
Before the couple left their summer respite, the home agent told them that of course they did not see the ghost because it looked exactly like the woman having the dreams.
Whoa! A very dramatic encounter indeed, and a very good read for the metaphysical enthusiast. From the eye of this reporter, she must have been picking up on some unknown frequency that was transplanting a metaphysical aspect of her self in the country home using radiated alpha proton waves -- a strange projection of the mind that maybe only Hitchcock could have concocted. It most certainly scared the servants (I hate when that happens).
This obviously calls for more than just the Jungian explanation drawn from the symbolic meaning found in dreaming of a house. And no dear readers, we will not be discussing Freud or the sexual implications of chronic “house-dreaming” (I’m writing this at the Minneapolis airport after all – there are Minnesotan men, women and children present, all chalk-full of stoic Scandinavian modesty).
Symbols, mortality, holiday fervor – O what ferocious pulse beats in this great dream-flux-machine, gleaning gleaming humanity on a syncopating glide through the deep psycho-firmament like a mammalian galleon “cacophonizing” the empty echoed cavern of pluming conscious blooms.
...In other words, over this holiday season there has been much talk of symbolic “psychic manifestations” across the Puget Sound area, from Santa showing up at SeaTac to the Seahawks potentially winning the Super Bowl. There seems to be a psychic haze-like fog hovering just above eye level from Shoreline all the way down to Burien produced by the shear psychic will of Washingtonians.
The BNT looked into the floating ooze, and yes, it appears there is a powerful and constant hanging cloud of psychic energy with one mission: to materialize the Seahawks at the Super Bowl.
In order to conduct an accurate reading of the mental mist, numerous psychic swabs were taken from the fog by BNT interns over Christmas break. They patrolled North Seattle down to SeaTac. They used plasma ionic nano-meters to measure the enveloping Seattle goop (college credit of course). Psychic spores were also meticulously grown on low-grade fructose cultures taken from Ballard samples.
Once the data was collected the BNT needed a strong bunch of candidates to interpret the findings. Chosen from fine Ballard stock, the team of professionals consisted of: Past BNT staff fired exactly 3.5 years ago (to remedy bias and maintain ruthless objectivity), two amateur meteorologists, a psychic from the land of Fargo, and a gaggle of patrons wrangled in from the Ballard Smoke Shop.
Upon inspection of the samples there was a frenzy of gallop-hypothesizing and loud voices all yelling over one another predicting the Rapture, apocalyptic meteorites, ham flavored beer, Mayor McGinn becoming president in 2020... etcetera. Madness spread like mayonnaise. Luckily there were fire extinguishers, lutefisk, and Valium to conciliate the group.
Z-tests, inverted ANOVA dilated algorithms, a smart phone, fancy lasers and crayons were used to infer the strongest unadulterated statistical conclusions. Calculated results of the findings lifted more than eyebrows.
Upon stringent analysis this serious group of Scandinavian “Riders of the Storm” found a ninety-one and a half percent chance of the 12th man displaying Seattle colors at the Big Game in February. Further analysis of the psychic swabs and spore cultures revealed the Seahawks winning within a 15-point margin over a team with either a bird or a horned beast emblem (Ravens, Rams or.... The Vikings). Which could have been determined for sure but further analysis was impossible after the samples had to be destroyed for fear of The Thing (The data was suspect within 24 hours after someone coughed cannabis cigar smoke over the psychic swabs – prescription of course – that lead to irrefutable contamination).
Of course more samples and testing will need to be conducted for an accurate prediction, but in this camp the Hawks are backed by psychic energy and jingoism proving the physical affects of the mental will and dreams on physical reality.
However, dreams can only go so far (Ask Carlos Castaneda). The Dream is just another layer in the harvested onion that is this great American country. From sea to shining sea, this land was made for you and me and all dreamers and all serious "Riders of the Storm."
