One winter morning in rural Alabama, our crew was surveying a pinewoods for a proposed highway. The weather was frosty and I was wearing my usual archaeologist’s uniform of several clashing flannel shirts layered with camouflage pants. We walked in transects, about 30 meters (100ft) apart, testing the soil every so often for cultural artifacts.
If we found anything, we’d do some more sampling and, sometimes, we would find an ancient pre-Columbian village site, or evidence of a lost historic fort. Our job wasn’t to totally excavate these discoveries, but rather work with land owners and government laws to preserve as much as possible; this is the guiding ethos of cultural resource management.
As I padded along on the soft bed of pine needles in this mature wood, I suddenly had a waking vision – clear as day – an image that superimposed itself over everything else, much like happens in hypnagogic reverie. The image was a tombstone, a classic Western 1800s design with the curved top. It was almost cartoonish, like it was straight out of a Loony Toons cartoon with Wil.E Coyote.
I stopped in my tracks, and the image lingered for a few seconds and then faded out.
Being how I don’t often see waking hallucinations, I was struck. And more importantly, I was struck on alert. I started walking again, unable to shake off the bizarre experience. I walked further, maybe 100 meters, with heightened vigilance. Then, I saw something, or maybe I felt something, and I did the unthinkable – I left my prescribed transect and wandered off course with a gut feeling.
And that’s when I really saw it: a slight depression in the thick pine needles. Roughly six feet long, an oblong drop in the forest floor of maybe an inch. My breath caught in my throat. I looked beyond, and saw another depression. And another. I had discovered an unmarked graveyard.
I hollered for help and the crew came over. We flagged off the area: 29 potential grave sites.
Government work is slow, and I learned two years later that the next phase of work by a cultural crew that came to investigate had determined the site was indeed an unmarked cemetery. Historic research revealed they were likely graves of enslaved people who worked the fields of a nearby plantation before the Civil War.
The best part: the cemetery and the woods around it were protected; the road project went around the site and not a single grave was disturbed. From this perspective, this is an archaeological success story.
Yet I never told my colleagues the story of how I had discovered the graves. How I had a waking vision and corresponding intuition that led me to the site. The graves were just barely visible when standing a few feet away—from a distance, the depressions blended right in with the forest floor. Had I not been on alert, had I not left my transect, I probably would have walked right past it. The next person in line was upslope, and wouldn’t have walked through that section of woods at all either.
From a material standpoint, it doesn’t really matter. I did my job, got paid, and culture was preserved. We helped preserve some holy ground and didn’t disturb the dead.
But the image haunted me for years, and so did all the various ways of interpreting how the image of the tombstone relates to the cemetery.
I even doubted that I experienced this event. What if I’m confounding my memories to tell a good story? After all, memory is highly unreliable and is rescripted all the time.
So I dug into my personal archive full of journals, and found the terse note that I wrote in my journal for that day. (Fun fact: between 1991 – 2011, I used small Dayminder journals to summarize what happened on each and every day, sometimes including dreams. I’d estimate that maybe 20 days are unaccounted for within this 20 year period).
Here’s what I wrote for January 26, 2000. “Was in a good mood. Had tombstone “flash” then found cemetary – 29 graves total.”
Other details of that day: I had lunch at Ellis V restaurant in Demopolis, AL and that evening continued my reading of Another roadside attraction by Tom Robbins. I also looked up the night before —had I been drinking heavily? No, but I had watched “US Marshalls” on television and then sat down to write a friend a letter.
When I describe the sequence of events like a structural account of a dream, I’m left with this: the dreamer saw something unusual, became more alert, and then encountered a variation of the unusual image now embedded in the dreamscape. The only difference: I was awake in consensual reality. So the visionary image of the tombstone first overlayed ordinary perception, and then the variation of the image was integrated with the perceptual field of the landscape and verified by others.
And of course, these are human remains, not just a random image. These are storied lands. These are places saturated by memory, prayer and remembrance for the beloved dead. The descendants of those buried there are still in need of healing and reparations, in a state where forced labor in prisons is still happening today.
I see this vision as an example of ecodreaming.
Here’s how I have described ecodreaming:
Dreams reflect our humanity, and how we are embedded in the natural world, or what eco-philosopher David Abram calls the “more-than-human-world.” The reason this perspective is not often talked about is because one of the frameworks of our culture-at-large is that we are each individual cogs in an unthinking machine called Earth.
So it takes a little work to do eco-dreaming – which I loosely define as dreaming as if the earth is alive and trying to communicate with us. I am convinced that part of dreams’ evolutionary advantage is how they not only reflect our embeddedness in nature, but also provide warnings of probable dangers and opportunities for our community.
Today, I’d say that ecodreaming also rests on the idea that we are somewhat unstuck in time, as argued most convincingly by Eric Wargo in his book Precognitive dreaming and the long self. In fact, Wargo would most likely interpret my tombstone event as a precognitive flash rippling back in time a few minutes. In this interpretation, a living, communicative cosmos is not needed; time is just kind of messy and sometimes paints outside the lines. It’s a compelling argument and well reasoned.
The “time is wonky” interpretation provides a paradox, as had I not been primed by the image, I very likely would not have left my transect and discovered the graves in the first place. Paradox isn’t a gamer killer tho. Isn’t that wonderful? The two events come together, a true synchronicity, which Carl Jung defined as consisting “of two factors: an unconscious image appearing in the consciousness and an objective situation in the outside world that coincides with the content of the image.”
Maybe that’s too weird. That’s OK. As I wrote about my article about psychic dreams, “I’m also skeptical of a lot of paranormal claims–due more to a grumpy temperament than a philosophical position. I most likely wouldn’t believe in psychic dreams at all, if not for the inconvenient truth that I have these experiences myself.”
And depending on the time of day, I’m a skeptic or a believer. I wake up as Scully and go to bed as Mulder. We argue constantly.
Psychic investigator and precognitive dreamer Renée Haynes notes that events like these threaten our “boggle threshold,” the line beyond which we shake our heads and can’t accept it may be real.
These days, trained in phenomenology and imaginal research methods, I try to hold off on interpretations, and stay close to the events, close to the actual images and experiences. I mostly fail at this though. Do I need to posit a communicative cosmos that somehow wanted me to discover these graves? No. Yet, I find that being part of a cosmos that is alive and conscious to be more interesting than the dead one, and more often to lead to new questions.
Have you had any events like this that at first jumped pass your own boggle threshold but then later you were able to integrate into a larger (or weirder) worldview? Shoot me a comment, I’d love to hear about them.
And if you liked this essay, be sure to subscribe. You’ll get access to my weekly Dream Studies Newsletter and keep up on the goings on of the dream research community.
I too experienced a boggle-worthy time slip. On 4th of June, 2016, I awoke from a dream in which someone told me to collect “all my poems” to publish them in a book. Even in the dream I knew that was nonsense. But I was piqued enough to look for the few poems I may have recorded. One I found ended with two lines from an Irish folk song (Shool Aroon) – in Irish Gaelic. I copied the lines from the sleeve leaflet of an old Topic record, 40 years previously. For no obvious reason I checked my copy – which had been carefully proofread, with proofreader’s caret and other marks – against the original. I was very surprised to find my copy, despite careful checking at the time, was full of “errors”. Truly intrigued, I looked up the song on the web, and found five sites with lyrics matching my retro-causally altered copies (I made four copies in 1977). I checked both Irish versions at the Folk Song and Dance library and London Irish Centre, and the literature on backwards causation and modern physics. That led to two articles in Paranormal Review, even including a critique of theoretical physics. I can send them to anyone interested.
wow — yes – Charles please send your links here. I’ll approve them. Thanks for sharing this story; such a lovely loop. I wonder if there’s significance to be found in the content of the folk song itself that has relevance for 2016 Charles — as well as 2024 Charles 🙂