Dreams of Dixie

Dearest Rachel –

I dreamed of Dixie last night.

I’m not entirely sure why. I don’t hold to the romanticism of the Lost Cause – or any lost cause, for that matter. I try my level best to forget the girls I had crushes on (and behaved as stupidly over them as any mid-teen boy would do, thus explaining why I would want to forget them), although admittedly, that’s a very different form of romanticism. I get that one is meant to learn from the past, and avoid their mistakes, but those seem to be lessons taught at a more macro rather than individual level; there’s not much for me to take away, personally, from the Civil War and the events leading up to it.

In a way, it felt almost as if I was part of a movie set, filming the thing, which is no less absurd. It may be wild to realize it, but we’re farther removed from the making of Gone With the Wind, temporally speaking, than the folks involved with that were from the Civil War itself. And for all that I know about that movie, I don’t think I’ve ever had the patience to sit through it in its entirety – and I’m certainly not about to try now – let alone study how it was made, so for my mind to try and cobble up an idea of what that experience was like would have been an exercise in futility.

So I’m guessing that it didn’t even really try; in fact – and I don’t know how I knew this was going on – it seemed as if filming was taking place somewhere in exurban Sydney. And while I realize that Australia has a lot of wide open spaces to fill in, the fact remains that most of them look more like the Wild West then the antebellum (or even mid-war) South. Meanwhile, if I wanted to film something in the Wild West, the Wild West itself still has plenty of wide open spaces of its own still left.

But hey, dreams aren’t expected to have any particular logic to them. Which is a good thing, as this one seemed to be particularly lacking in any of that. It probably didn’t help that it was so brief that I was only able to ascertain where I was (as well as where it all was supposed to be – whether what I was seeing bore any resemblance to the real thing was beside the point). There was no interaction with other dramatis personae; indeed, I’m not sure there was enough time to notice whether there even were other people in the scene, let alone talk or do anything with them. All there was was the realization of where I was supposed to be, and where I ‘really’ was, with no other context as to why.

Now, upon waking up, I think I might know what prompted such a random thought. This morning has an atmosphere that is pure autumn – cold, and still dark – and while I’ve experienced mornings like this on my way to the gym, this morning somehow feels different. For one thing, I’d not even so much as gotten out of bed, and yet I could still feel the chill; on this early morning walks in August, I’ve at least been out of the house when I’ve been confronted with the cold. Even now that the sun has come out, it’s still decidedly cool in a way that hasn’t been the case in months – indeed, I haven’t experienced cold like this (apart from several overcast and outright rainy days) since early February, thanks to my travels. They say it’s going to be like this for the entirety of the weekend before going back to what we might consider to be normal temperatures for this time of year, but for the moment, I admit to being particularly unused to this.

So maybe I’m just dreaming of places that I wish to be in, if only so as to wake up amid a more ambient temperature. Whether accurate, or not, it certainly seems a plausible explanation. What this has to do with antebellum history, I’ve no idea. It’s not as if it was hotter in Dixie back in those days compared to now, apart from the invention of air conditioning. I certainly don’t know what was (or, more likely, was not) comfortable about those days; I knew people who were Civil War buffs back in college, but I was never one of them. And as for Australia? Maybe that’s just a desire to get back on the road somewhere – anywhere – again. Which is weird, because while I have started to make plans to do so, Down Under has never come up in that process until now. I know I didn’t have a lot of time in any one place there, relatively speaking, but I can’t imagine what my subconscious had in mind.

Then again, I’m probably reading far too much into this. It was a dream, nothing more, and while I’m sure you would have wanted to hear about it, I don’t know that you would’ve done much in the way of trying to interpret the whys and wherefores regarding what prompted it.

So with that being said, I won’t do any more of that, either. All I will ask is that you keep an eye on me, and wish me luck. I’m sure I’m going to need it.