The Northwoods Chronicles by Elizabeth Engstrom

the room,
got into the car and headed north without even stopping to pack a
bag.
    If she didn’t accomplish this in time, Cook
would die before she could get back to him. If this was a stupid,
irresponsible move, it was also irreversible, and that pain-filled
little exchange would be their last.
    No, she’d call him every day. She’d call him
every day and report on her progress. She wouldn’t be able to sleep
twenty-four hours a day. She’d have to do something else some of
the time. What would she do to fill her days?
    Study about dreams.
    Feel guilty about Cook. Feel guilty about the
feeling of freedom she had by being away from him and not having to
go through his death with him. Feel guilty about leaving him with
his mother, when she was his wife and ought to be by his side, but
instead, she was running away, being pulled toward something in the
northwoods.
    She drove all night, and as dawn grayed the
cloudy sky, a soft drizzle began and she turned off the highway
into the parking lot of the Northern Aire Motel.
    Mrs. Atkisson greeted her with a long, warm hug,
and showed her to a spare bedroom in the lodge. “You must be
tired,” she said, and Missie certainly was, although she was still
too excited to sleep. She didn’t even have anything to unpack.
    Mrs. Atkisson put her to bed with a nice
nightie, flannel sheets and a glass of warm milk, wished her well
on her quest and closed the bedroom door.
    Missie prayed again that she was doing the right
thing, and then she tried to relax, willing her buzzing muscles to
slow down. She closed her eyes, slowed her breathing, and listened
to the rain on the edge of the roof right outside her window.
Eventually, she fell into a deep sleep.
    She dreamed she was dressed in a long, red satin
ball gown, running through some antebellum southern mansion,
looking for something, bumping into people in her mindless panic.
She dashed as fast as her uncooperative and too-small shoes would
permit, little strings of hair coming loose from her carefully
woven hairdo and sticking to the back of her neck. She went from
room to room, eyes restlessly scanning the crowd, then to the
veranda, then back inside the hot, humid house, looking, looking,
and she wasn’t even sure what it was she was looking for. . ..
    The next morning, Missie sat, vacant-headed,
cradling a Styrofoam cup of hot coffee while at least a dozen
people crowded the small dining room. George was back, or else he
was still there, at the end of the season, and Missie heard a
desperation in his voice that she hadn’t heard when they were both
there before. He had a dream to dream that he hadn’t quite managed,
and he’d been trying all summer.
    Missie didn’t have the luxury of all that time
to have her dream.
    There was much talk about controlling the
dreams, especially the technique of looking at one’s dream hands.
“You program yourself at the beginning, before you fall asleep,”
one of them said, “to look at your hands, and then sometime during
the dream, you look at your hands, and it reminds you. Then you’re
consciously dreaming.”
    “Yeah?” George challenged him. “Can you do
that?”
    “I sometimes get to see my hands in my dream,”
the other man said, “but then I wake up.”
    “I know it can be done,” somebody else said.
“Mrs. Atkisson, are people successful at controlling their dreams
here?”
    “Oh, I don’t know about that,” Mrs. Atkisson
said.
    ~~~
    Missie spent that day in the lobby, looking
through all the books and magazines she had brought on dream
research, and discovered, in talking with a few of the other
guests, that the lodge bookshelves also held books, old books, on
dream interpretation and research. She immersed herself in the
topic, certain that it would have an effect on her
subconscious.
    It didn’t. That night she had nonsensical dreams
about things laughing at her from the dark.
    She cried during the dream report the following
morning, and of all the people who could