My husband pointed out the other day that I’ve now lived in Rio de Janeiro for longer than I’ve lived in any other town in my life. Thirteen years! Eleven of them in the same apartment. The first two years we didn’t realize we were staying, so we just rented some temporary places notable mostly for various weirdnesses. But not enough time has passed to detail that!

Nevertheless, this came to mind the other morning when I dreamed I was visiting a house in the town I lived in for a good part of my childhood (but only 10 years!) — Yellow Springs, Ohio. I can’t recall a dream in which I was in my college hometown (Bloomington, Indiana) or in Manhattan or Hoboken or, for that matter, Madrid or Chicago or Wanfried-an-der-Lahn, or dozens of other places I’ve visited over the years. Any time I dream vividly of a recognizable place, it’s either Yellow Springs or Sharon, Connecticut.

So here I was, not for the first time, dreaming that I was visiting the old house on Hyde Road where a childhood friend had lived. In dreams set in Yellow Springs the most common locations are Hyde Road or the Glen. I suspect Hyde Road was particularly memorable because it had, in the 1970s, many horses pastured along the roadside, and I would ride my bike down there as often as I could just to see the horses.

My friend’s old house on that road was striking for various reasons. Most other people’s houses were interesting, if only because at the age of 8 or 10 I was now visiting other kids in their homes more often, and for the first time really getting to know the details of how other families lived. One had the coolest squishy linoleum in the hallway, which would hold the imprint of your fingernail if you pressed it. (An activity forbidden as soon as it was discovered by the mother!) Another had a tree house and a strange structure called a carport. It was the only house with a carport I had ever seen; the rest had garages. And this old house on Hyde Road had a bunch of strange features that I remember vividly to this day. One was an enormous brindled dog that I mistook for a tiger on my first visit. Another was a little ‘house’ down from the back door where milk and butter had once been stored in the cold waters of a spring that flowed there. And most fascinating was a secret room, hidden below a large trapdoor in the living room floor, which was in turn hidden by an oriental rug (in my memory, at least). I was told it had been used to shelter people escaping slavery, since the town had been founded by Quakers, who were active in opposing slavery and helping those escaping across the Ohio River to freedom in the North.

So here I was again, as an adult in this dream, going down this same road, and seeing that there was a house-tour event going on. So I wandered up to the house and asked if I could take part in the tour. I no longer recall what happened after that. It was a visually vivid dream, but not otherwise very interesting.

When dreams are set in Sharon, CT the landscape tends to be the main feature – usually I am traversing the neighboring farm fields for some urgent reason or another; or I’m addressing problems in the gully or wooded hillside beside the little cottage we once lived in; these problems usually require traversing the neighboring fields to get the help of the neighbors. I don’t recall anything particularly memorable at the moment. It’s again the visual impact, the clarity of memory of those landscapes, that sticks in my head the most.

Both places had horses in common.

I don’t have any photos of Yellow Springs, but one can find it on google. Of the landscapes around Sharon. My favorite sort: rolling farmland.