What Dreams May Come

This is The Old Mill of Guilford.

Rowen County Court Minutes
10 January 1764

"Ordered that Daniel Dillin have licence to build a Publick Grist Mill on the Ready Fork of Haw River at the Mouth of Beavor Creek..."

Guilford County, NC was created out of Rowen County in 1771.

This is the Mill of my Dreams. Memory Bank 1977.

I was born in North Carolina. We lived there until I was about 7 or 8. We hadn't lived in Virginia long before the Mill creeped into my dreams. I never visited this mill, but we drove past it many, many times.

In my dreams, my family lived at the mill and one day our electricity, that was powered by the mill, went out. In my dreams, the wheel was inside and down a small flight of wooden steps. You then walked out onto a pier of sorts and the wheel was just across the water. You could feel the moisture in the air and see it dripping down the stone walls.

In my dreams, my Dad went to check it out and he was gone for a very long time. My Mom, my sister and I decided to check on him and when we got to the end of the pier, we saw him dead on top of the wheel. In my dreams, it panned from us on the pier to him dead on the wheel and then back to us and then back to him. I had this dream over and over for months.

And then my Dad left. It was probably 15 years later that I thought about those dreams again and realized that I dreamed my parents were divorcing. Intuition if you will. Do you believe in it? It's strong in our family. My Mom jokingly calls us witches.

This past February, my good friend Pogo and I took a girls only trip to Asheville. Interestingly, of all the paths I could have chosen, I chose the road that went past the mill - I was drawn to it. The Mill in the picture above was the second mill built and the one I remembered from childhood. The original had been across the road. I've always wondered if the wheel was inside the original mill...