I had this amazing technicolor dream once that I entitled “Sherrif’s Creek.” I’d like to make it into a full novel someday, or a screenplay if I could.

I dreamt that my father, brother, and I lived in the early stages of the American Industrial Revolution (1850’s)?. I was a very masculine figure built like He-man with long blonde hair. My father had just invited my brother and I to what I thought was another hunting trip but turned out to be the search for a sacred well, a spring called Sherrif’s Creek in the middle of the forest.

We were trying to find it because my dad wanted us to become very wealthy–I don’t know why. Perhaps we were looking for homestead land to map out, perhaps we were going to pan for gold. After five days journey into the northwest we came to a forest in foothills of the Applachians.

A business man had set up some kind of museum in a series of caverns. He was charging people to search the caverns, knee-high in water and illuminated on one side by sunlight, for minerals and water. It was this man who pointed us in the direction of Sherrif’s creek, into the frontier.

We passed the caverns on a thick forest trail and soon after we were ambushed by natives. My father and brother were killed but my swift and muscular body somehow fled to safety.

Now alone on the journey to find this creek and in the midst of so many natives somewhere in this wilderness, my dream then becomes an immersion story like dances with wolves. Somehow I am accepted into the midst of a certain tribe of peoples by Sherrif’s Creek and become fluent in their language.

I fall in love with a beautiful young woman of the tribe and I’ll never forget that the wedding ceremony consisted of us being bathed in mud to draw out our impurities. Crusted brown from head to toe, we knelt on our hands and knees at the feet of the Medicine Warrior, their priest, who incanted ceremonious chants which were echoed by the congregation. Then we bathed in the mineral spring & I layed with my wife for the first time.

Then while I sat up to meditate in the Native tradition, she slept. And while she slept she dreamt and somehow I experienced her dream as well while I was in meditation. She dreamt that she was in a forest and storming like a herd of buffalo was a bounding herd of dogs and cats steaming past her. She woke up in so much joy and told me her dream: “It means that the Great Spirit has granted us lots of children,” she proclaimed in bliss & joy and we were so happy.

But apparently, the dogs and cats stampeding through the forests were not the good omen she had hoped it was.

Then the rest of white society caught up to us and we were no longer protected by the frontier. A railroad was under construction which was running a stones throw from the sacred village. My new role in the tribe went from outsider to interpretor and in the midst of periodic violence between my two peoples I helped to negotiate some kind of peace agreement. Yet part of the terms of that agreement swept me up on the train away from my new home & family