She Dreamed On Route 66

My maternal grandmother had a streak of hyper-intuition which caused her to have premonitory dreams. Living on Route 66 in a small dusty town in southwestern Oklahoma, we visited her and her prankster husband every year, sometimes twice a year, and listened enthralled by his accounts of how she had dreamed of something happening to someone only for that dream to have then occurred in real life. Undergoing surgery once, she dreamed there was a scorpion in her hospital bed with her. The nurse found a scorpion in the bed when she was changing her sheets that same day of the dream. I never thought my grandmother's dreams were anything magical or miraculous, just cases of hyper-intuition.

My sister apparently inherited a healthy dose of that hyper-intuition, but instead of dreaming of things that would eventually happen, she deductively dreamed of stuff related to mysteries as yet unsolved. Mysteries with strong linkage to family and friends. Mysteries which compel storying now. One of those was a dream she had while traveling from Illinois along Route 66 near Foss, Oklahoma in the early 1970s, not long after she had married. We had family in Foss, and unbeknownst to anyone, a friend had lost his life there years earlier.

A faintly moonlit ribbon stretched taut over the gently rolling expanse of southwestern Oklahoma, Route 66 was monotonous yet soothing. In the passenger seat of their aging Chrysler, she surrendered to the vibration of the engine and hypnotizing, rhythmic sweep-and-thump of Route 66 concrete pavement slabs traversed. The subtle, occasional click of the push-button transmission was the only other sound sensed against the low rumble of the tires, grounding the scene in that red dust-laced reality of time and place.

Her head resting lightly against the bench seat, her features slowly relaxed into light sleep. Her husband, concentrating on the highway ahead, was acutely aware of the hulking 18-wheeler currently overtaking them, its headlights bright and its chrome glinting aggressively in the moonlight. He was focused on the immediate, tangible world of speed limits and road signs and defensive driving, utterly unaware that in the space surrounding them inside the car, a profound psychic rupture was occurring.

Above her closed eyes, in the silent, swirling theatre of her mind, a figure materialized—a missing acquaintance she had dated only once, suspended in inky, liquid darkness. The boy was frozen in an eternal, gentle drift. His familiar, youthful features—his neatly cropped hair, the thick frames of his glasses—all were instantly recognizable, yet distant memories. His eyes were closed, as if in finality of peaceful surrender to forces beyond mortal control.

But the peace was deceptive. Slender, sinuous tendrils of dark green moss and wispy sheets of algae clung to his hair and to the collar of his shirt. They moved with an almost imperceptible current, a silent, asymmetrical dance that bespoke an age spent submerged. The moss and algae were not decorative; rather an organic marker of years he had lain hidden, a macabre crown bestowed by the watery biome. Every shadow on his face, the algae and moss, spoke of the cold, deep sanctuary of a reservoir.

This image was no fragmented nonsense of a typical dream. It was a clear, distilled vision, a raw bolt of hyper-intuition kindled within the core of her subconscious mind. She saw him, she knew his fate, she felt the finality of the water’s embrace. A quiet, terrifying certainty settled over the dreamscape. And within that profound, internal knowing, a spectral number materialized beneath the submerged figure: "1970." The year he had disappeared. The number changed to “1973”. The year of her hyper-intuitive seeing. The year her subconscious mind's mulling over vague details bore witness to a death that had already occurred, a truth that would remain out of conscious-thought's reach for four more decades. She spoke of the dream to her brother later that year during their family’s Christmas gathering at their grandparent’s home not twenty miles ahead. He could offer no explanation, convinced the boy she had dreamed of was happily wandering the world in wild, youthful exhuberence.

As the 18-wheeler roared past, buffeting the Chrysler, she remained still, her breathing smooth but shallow. Her husband never glanced away from the road, only vaguely aware that they were passing the exit to Foss, Oklahoma, where their great aunt Effie and her delightful husband Sam lived—the geographic nexus of her intuitive dream imagery. The vision was linkage between the depths of her soul, the lost boy, and the vast, rolling expanse of Oklahoma landscape. It was the moment her mind leapt across time and matter, not to find the future, but to retrieve wispy, submerged fragments of stark reality from years past, cementing them all into a firm connection that even death could not sever.

This is the boat ramp at Foss Reservoir where Jimmy's remains were found submerged in his car with his two friends, Leah and Thomas forty-three years after their disappearance in 1970.