Another dream last night – a glimpse into that legendary world of mine which tantalizes me and fills me with sadness because I can never really experience it (unless perhaps through madness). I was making a drawing of a peculiar ramshackle wooden structure that seemed like a market place; I had been drawing all night and now as I was finishing, dawn was breaking. I wish I could somehow describe, even for myself, the strange supernatural aspect of this dawn – it seemed as if it were some wonderful dawn experience of my earlier life when I was somehow freer and more innocent. Human life commenced to stir – men were hurrying to work. I saw Paddy Lyons.
The scene changes, I am on that kind of a street that always hovers at the edges of towns, to the southeast. I saw a wonderful old wreck of a house, and next to it a peculiar circular frame that turned on a central axis. On it were hung long roller-towels, which it seemed had just been washed by some laundry girls who were laughing and working in a shed next to it. Their method of drying clothes was to whirl them in the sunshine on this apparatus. It was going now, the glaring white towels fluttering formed a striking contrast to the weather blackened old house. Beyond the latter was a tall structure of brick, seemingly some sort of memorial building. The hour was almost noon and just as the sun reached the meridian and commenced to pass it, one part of the architecture after another leaped suddenly out of the shadow in rapid succession, and the result was one of bewildering beauty. I watched it fascinated.
Charles E. Burchfield, Journals, Volume 38, pg. 40-41, February 28, 1932