Charles E. Burchfield's Dreams, Journals, June 7, 1935

A dream last night: I was wandering thru an unfamiliar territory. I came to the outskirts of a village, obscure in the sort of twilight that always hovers in my dreams. A small manufacturing sort of place with a gaunt Victorian Mansion with tall round–topped windows half-hidden by gloomy elm-trees. I went inside; it was furnished in the typical gloominess of the mid-Victorian age. Bertha was at my side – I made a deprecatory [remark] about the place, but she said she liked it.

I was now in a low [marshy] place, outside the town. It was the end of the day. To the east young workers of the town were playing ball. My feet were getting wet, so I climbed up on a high post, part of an old fence. The moon arose in the east, and as the day died, the moonlight seemed to glow and expand until the whole earth was up almost as bright as day with a [marvelous] supernatural silver light. I seemed to feel it flooding over me.

I went over to where the young men were playing ball. By now most of them had gone to their homes. One young fellow remained, and wanted me to throw the ball for him to bat in a long arbor. I said I had better take off my glasses, and when I did so realized that I then would be unable to see the ball well. I went into a sort of store. It seemed now as tho there was a new book out, about a man with plenty of money [who] went around over the country, doing little good deeds with his money, buying things that certain people wanted but could not afford – and now it seems as if I were that man. When I bought a book, the clerk, thru some pre-arranged plan of my manager or guardian, gave me as my “change” thick packets of bills, fives & tens & twenty. I stuffed my pockets with them. A young man came in, and wanted the book I had just bought, but could not afford it as he had been out of work a long time. I gave him my copy, and it turned out it was the last one they had. It was “The Man in Lower Ten” (by Mary Roberts Rinehart).

I went outside into sort of a beer-garden. It was night but an odd indefinite light came out of the zenith, revealing an orchard of tall heroic apple trees, branches of which were covered with hoar frost that glowed with a pale metallic gleam. Beyond a field tall grass, dark & somber, lit up only by this strange twilight – I thought of the insects in the earth, and of the quiet brooding of the earth waiting for day to come again.

I awoke at this point, and I was sorry to come back to reality.

 Charles E. Burchfield, June 7, 1935