Jerry Ochs

Seeing as how Hollywood has recently been releasing films based on video games, comic books, and television programs, I believe each of Phil's dreams could be turned into a summer blockbuster, given the right cast.

Philip Spiess

If you work on this, Jerry, I will expect financial recompense.

Dale Gieringer

To Bruce - My "real" birthday (i.e., conception) dates back to the week of the first atom bomb test at Trinity.  I've always thought of myself as a child of the atomic age.

Re Nightmares -  In my most terrible nightmare, which has recurred a handful of times in different forms, I have set off a bomb blast or derailed a train or done some equally awful deed that ends up causing mayhem and destruction.  For whatever reason I can't tell, perhaps a reminiscence of teen-age pranks with fireworks.  I am then understandably and quite properly overwhelmed by remorse and guilt at my dastardly deed, waking up in sweat to find  to my immense relief that it was only a dream.  

   At the other end of the spectrum was the time I dreamed seeing Saddam Hussein standing twenty feet in front of me on a stage, and being frustrated at my inability to do anything to nab him then and there.

 And speaking of nightmares, here's a picture from our neighborhood in the midst of California's worst drought in over 1,000 years.  Normally at this time of year the hill is matted with thick tall dry grass like hay;  this year you can see bare ground..

Steven Levinson

Bruce:  I was one of the June 8 babies.  In September 1945, when I was presumably conceived, my father was on active duty in the Army Air Corps at various installations in the continental United States, having been rushed through UC Medical School in three calendar years from 1941 through 1944.  He was sent to the Philippines in 1945 and served at Clark Field as the Company medical, mess, and motor pool officer (perhaps he was the letter "M" officer), where, according to him, he had a jolly good time.  In his absence, my 19-year-old mother moved back in with her mother (my Granny) and grand-father (my Dearpa) in the Belvedere Apartments in North Avondale.  That's where I came home to from Cincinnati Jewish Hospital.  I was six months old before my father saw me.

For the record, Lynn Gehler was an October 17 baby.

Steven Levinson

Dale:  It occurs to me that your parents decided to compete with Trinity and change the world with you. I'd say they did a pretty good job.  You've given society a right good shake by the shoulders!

Philip Spiess

Dale:  As one of my old friends, learning that you were conceived with Trinity, I'll drink no less than three Manhattans in your honor, as you continue to project much good humor (indeed, we conceived much good humor together in our WHHS days).

Another conception:  I'm reminded of Oscar Wilde's riposte when a presumably "genteel" lady of his acquaintance asked him, "Mr. Wilde, what is the difference between men and women?"  His response:  "Madam, I can't conceive."

Philip Spiess

Jeff, Jerry, and others:  To return to the dream thread (Part 3; if you want me to stop with my dreams, just say so).  Now for some dreams from my Walnut Hills years.  I, too, had that dream where I was missing classes or exams or something (I still have it periodically):  in its first incarnation, I couldn't find the Band room at WHHS, and panicked (this may have actually happened).  More recently, the dream entails not attending classes for months on end (they may be math classes), not even knowing where the class is held, or realizing I haven't a chance of passing the class, or failing to sign up for the proper classes and not being recognized as a valid student by the teacher (professor).  Unbelievably, right up to the present, some of these dreams continue to be at WHHS (insecurity?)!

Another dream I remember from this period concerned the WHHS boys' swimming pool.  It may have been my senior year, but I had what I considered a splendid chocolate brown suit that I really liked, and in my dream I am in the swimming pool (alone), dressed in the brown suit, leaning back and seated in one of those right-handed writing-arm chairs we all had in our classrooms, not sinking but paddling around, having the time of my life.  I am not wet; I remain totally dry throughout this.  I have no idea what this dream means (Jeff?).

Then there was the dream (one of my favorites) which simply consisted of a beautifully lit (with skylights and gas lamps), all-white, three-story-high room, decorated with numerous hanging plants and antique clocks on the walls, where I realized I was going to live (my apartment in the dream, but nothing I've ever actually seen).

There were a good number of times when I waited after school (later than the end of the day) for my mother to pick me up; this she would do on the front drive, so I'd wait half way down the school's front steps, where there was a kind of terrace, after which the steps divided and went on down below.  I'd stand there and look at the woods and Victory Parkway beyond and imagine I was some sort of European dictator addressing the mobs below.  (Okay, I hate to say it, but I probably got the image from pictures of Hitler addressing crowds in Vienna after the Anschluss.)  Anyway, one time I had a dream that I was doing this as President (of the U.S.?  I don't know) and I suddenly got assassinated (shot) from below; I was immediately put into a funeral procession, but in the course of the procession I reincarnated (I'm really good at that!) and came back to life with great acclaim from the crowds!  [This surely occurred sometime after the Kennedy assassination in 1963, yes?]

So you can see that I really was the "strange little boy" (in the late Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman's phrase) that many of you (perhaps all) thought me in our high school days.  I still am.  [And in case you haven't noticed, I'm really writing my autobiography in these posts.]

Jerry Ochs

Phil still dreams about being in high school.  Is anybody seven decades old in dreamland?  If not, why not?

Philip Spiess

To clarify, Jerry, these last were dreams I had during my high school years.  But I have realized, over many years, that all of my creative moments and inspirations were during these years -- everything else (including these posts) has been mere repetition.

Mary Vore (Iwamoto)

I have no memory of dreams in my high school years - a merciful part of aging!  The dream I do remember vividly is when my first son was two years old, and I dreamt he was hit by a car in front of our house.  I woke up in terror, and could swear I had heard the sound of the car hitting him.  In trying to figure out where this came from (aside from the usual anxieties about your firstborn), I figured that the sound I heard was the newspaper hitting the front door.  If so, that means that my brain had constructed the dream nanoseconds after hearing the sound???  Can the (normal) brain do that?  My other dream from when our children were young was running into my husband at the Lexington airport and realizing with horror that we had forgotten to compare notes on our trips and arrange for someone to take care of the boys.  The others stem from the normal fears of being unprepared - I can't find the room where I am supposed to speak, I forgot to get dressed, my slides are wrong, etc, etc.  These dreams do make me ensure that I am prepared, so guess they serve a useful purpose.  But, why can't I dream I win the Nobel Prize??!!  

Stephen Collett

Thanks to Bruce for the histogram of our birthdays. Interesting conclusions.

I am March 16 (you have March 14 as a flag day, though I don´t get just why). And my single brother (no, he is married by my only brother), eight years my senior, is also March 16. So my parents must have had some pattern of there own.

Have you got anything on estimated life spans?

Nancy Messer

I was 21 when my mother died of cancer at age 46.  After that, whenever I had a dream that she was in, she appeared as a transparent shadowy figure while everyone else in the dream appeared as regular people.  This continued for years until finally she appeared as a regular person.  She hasn't been in any of my dreams for many years so I don't know how she would appear now.

Philip Spiess

Wow, Nancy, that boggles the imagination!  Although my dead relatives have only marginally appeared in my dreams, I had a major dream (I think during my first graduate school year) in which our fellow student and my good friend Tom Gottschang's mother appeared.  (If you don't remember, she was killed in a serious car accident on Winton Road during, I think, our freshman college year.  And Tom, if you're reading this, I apologize if I have brought up unhappy memories.)  She was a very vibrant and dynamic woman, and so she appeared in my dream, even though I knew (in the dream) that she was deceased.

Dale mentioned nightmares; so I'll mention several.  When I was very young, say five or thereabouts, I still slept in the same room with my sister, who was a year older (we slept in bunk beds).  It was a time when our nighttime stories were Grimm's fairy tales and so on, a number of which featured foxes and wolves as despicable characters.  So my sister and I had conjured up a threatening creature called "Foxy the Wolf."  One night I (and maybe my sister) was awakened with the idea (vision?  nightmare?) that "Foxy the Wolf" was looking in the back window, with ominous intent.  We shrieked out, scaring our parents (who were still up watching early television, so it couldn't have been that late).  This has always been a questioning moment in the history of our family, for my sister thought she saw it too, so either something did look in the window, or there was a collective or suggestive hallucination of some sort, based on fairy tales.  I will only add that many years later, after I had moved upstairs and the room continued to be my sister's, we had three occasions of a Peeping Tom (who was eventually caught) at that same window.

As I said, I slept upstairs, but then (my teen years), as now, I had terrible trouble getting to sleep.  My father often would turn on the hall light and come upstairs to check on me, and I'd have to douse my night-light when I was reading Sherlock Holmes or finishing my homework and pretend to be asleep.  One night in summer I was wide awake but with my light out and I heard someone creeping up the creaking stairs and across the hall to my door!  It couldn't be my father, because the hall light had not been turned on so he could see his way.  The door to my room slowly creaked open, and a gigantic shadow, cast by the moon, appeared against my wall!  I screamed out in terror -- and was echoed by another scream -- that of my father, who I had scared the you-know-what out of by my scream, who had come to check on me as usual, but who had not turned on the hall light because it was much later than usual.

And, finally, two bizarre incidents when I was in college and graduate school:  one night, circa 1966, I was in my bed in my room in Clifton (so it must either have been summer or Christmas vacation), and I suddenly woke up in the middle of the night with my arm hanging over the edge of the bed and with the distinctly horrifying feeling that my hand was being held tightly by a malicious black imp who was hiding under the bed!  (I had never had any notions of monsters under the bed in my youth.)  Worse, I had a picture of this imp:  it was featured in an illustration for Hans Christian Andersen's story of "The Steadfast Tin Soldier," which was in my edition of Andrew Lang's The Yellow Fairy Book.  The other incident, in my last graduate school (i.e., 1988):  I was in bed sleeping in the graduate dorm room I shared with a Theological Seminary student (Drew University is a Methodist University), when I had an overwhelming sense that demons were trying to drag my soul down to Hell.  I struggled against this (in my mind, I suppose, but also physically pressing hard against the mattress), and even was ready to call out to my roommate to help me, figuring that, since he was studying for the ministry, he might know what to do, when suddenly all otherworldly pressure was off, and I could relax (though I was sweating profusely).

Go figure.

Larry Klein

OK, so now I have to ask: Did I really go to school with you people??  I'm asking, not because of the strange brews you have in your dreams, but because you REMEMBER THEM!!  That is utterly amazing that folks can remember dreams from high school, let alone last night. 

Stephen Collett

I am so in on that, Larry. I can´t remember a dream for five minutes, even when I think I have a grasp on wakening of the important features that I want to remember. It is, as others have said, mostly a half-panicked effort to get something done. To get everyone on the bus, or .......

The thing about seeing your own body in a dream I remember from the Don Juan books of Casteneda. Don Juan tells the protogee (which we later find out was all made up by Castaneda) that to own and use your dreams you need to focus on your hands, and when you can see your hands in your dream you will be able to direct your dreams as a means to explore (what?)....

They seem to come all at the end of sleeping, like the early morning clash of trams´ breaks. Where I live it is tractors. Those last hours so laden with uninterpretable message.

Good thread 

Bruce Fette

Steve and Phil,

Thank you for your two stories. Actually, I had hoped that some of our classmates out there would have somewhat more romantic stories to tell about parents eagerly returning from the war to the girl he always wanted to marry, and flashes of whorlwind romance and marraige. Good stuff for the makings of a Neil Simon play perhaps. 

In my case, I never really heard the story. I only found the pictures when my Mom passed away.

Bruce Fette

By the way, we have 21 classmates living in California, and I am sure everyone knows of the several issues now ongoing in California with drought and fire. 

Are all of our California classmates OK?

Philip Spiess

Bruce:  To clarify, my parents were married in 1941 just before the war, when the draft was announced, and my Grandfather Goepp (my mother's father) told them, "You two had better marry now!"  My mother told me, just this week, that she didn't think she'd ever have had the gumption to marry my father then (she was twenty years old) if the draft hadn't happened.  [P.S.:  But after the war, when my father returned from the South Pacific (cue the Rodgers & Hammerstein music) to Fort Belvoir and Alexandria, Virginia, my sister was born (in Alexandria, 1945), and then I was born (in Cincinnati, 1946).]

Larry:  Maybe the "strange brews" you refer to were the inspirers of our dreams?

Okay, guys, this is my last installment on my dreams (I promise), as I am checking out for a three-week vacation through Vermont.  At Post 1898, I referred to my more recent dreams as relating to earthly cataclysms, largely floods.  One I remember showed a vast plain, an extensive desert perhaps, stretching to the far horizon, through the middle of which ran a causeway.  I was trying to rapidly transverse this causeway, possibly with part of my family, when I suddenly saw rapidly advancing tidal floods coming streaming in from both sides (no, I have not been to Mont-St.-Michel, but I suspect this was what it is like at high tide).  The goal (in my dream) was to get across the causeway to the far horizon of hills and safety before the rising waters overtook the rapidly dissolving (now) sands on which the causeway stood!  As I recall, we made it to the far hills -- sounds almost like a Hemingway story, doesn't it? -- (or perhaps the dream ended as we maybe made it) as the whole landscape behind us sank -- disintegrated -- into the rising waters.

And my last vision from Dreamland (name of a major Coney Island, New York, amusement park at the turn of the last century):  I was on the more northern stretches of Clifton Avenue in Clifton, that is, the portion of the street that drops down the hill from Lafayette Avenue to (former) Winton Place Station, and thence to Spring Grove Avenue, when the waters (from where?  the Mill Creek?) were rising rapidly and melting everything in their path.  This included (indeed, featured, in my dream) the hideously bulwark-like concrete Cincinnati Rapid Transit Station (half way down the hill) that had been built in the 1920s but had never been utilized (because the Rapid Transit System, built in the old Miami & Erie Canal ditch or right-of-way, i.e., under what became Central Parkway, had never been completed!); however, this concrete structure, standing vacant for some forty years, had finally been demolished in the early 1960s (well before my dream) in order to build Interstate I-75 through that corridor.  As the waters rose, this concrete structure melted like Margaret Hamilton as the witch in The Wizard of Oz (1939), and I fled toward the higher ground of Lafayette Avenue.

Steve Collett:  Speaking of out-of-body experiences, circa 1976 I had a severe kidney stone attack.  I was put on something stronger than Percodan for the pain, and suddenly one morning at my typewriter at the National Trust for Historic Preservation (yes, we still had typewriters then, and my typing stool had been President Woodrow Wilson's night stool, or potty chair --but that's another story), I felt myself floating up near the ceiling and saw myself seated down below at the typewriter (I immediately requested a change of prescription!).  Although I remember the writings of Castenada, I don't think his comments on hands has held true in my dreams.  And, yes, Stephen, I do think that our most cogent dreams do occur at the end of our sleep cycle:  the dog or cat awakes me in the early morning hours, to be fed or let out, and then I return to sleep, perchance to dream.  One more thing, Stephen:  the morning outdoor clash is usually the clash of garbage cans in American suburbs, as celebrated by Jeff Rosen and me in our 1962 [?] collective series of poems on garbage and the Cincinnati City Dump (real litter-ature).

Jeff:  Feel free to explain any of the parts of my dreams; I won't be offended, for I know how splendidly the Renaissance interpreted dreams.

Laura Reid (Pease)

Hi all, I really don't have anything different about dreams than anyone else.....late to class, never went to class, didn't study for the test, never bought the book, teacher didn't like me; I didn't like the teacher; old boyfriends.....so funny, all school related.

But I wanted to put in a plug for the musical Motown; I saw it last night at the Aronoff; it will bring back so many memories:  Jackie Wilson, the Marvelettes, the Temptations, the Contours, the Supremes, Jr. Walker, the Four Tops, the Jackson 5,  Gladys Knight, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson.....I could go on....we were on our feet and every head of the over 50 crowd was keeping time with the beat.  See it if you can......now, classmates, back to your dreams.....

Richard Murdock

I would like to add my story to Bruce's request for information about birthdates.   My father attended University of CA Berkeley and was entrolled in the Navy ROTC program there.   He graduated in 1936 and began working but was recalled to active duty in June, 1941.  He served in both the Atlantic and the Pacific theaters until he was released from active duty December, 1945.   I was born on December 12, 1946. 

I like to think I am "Hello Honey I am home." as the timing works out about right.    The really unusual thing about that date is that my brother was born on December 12, 1941. 

Regarding dreams:   I vividly remember a recurring dream I had during my HS days:   I was in class at Walnut Hills and suddenly realized I was completely naked.  No one else seemed to notice or care, but my horror and embarassment  at my predicament was off the charts -  which always thankfully woke me up. 

Dale Gieringer

Bruce -   I can't answer for every WHHS classmate in California, but thankfully these fires are raging far afield from the urban centers where most of us live (unlike the great 1991 Oakland fire, which came within inches of incinerating our home).  Most people aren't aware that California has the highest concentration of population in urban centers of any state.  Happily just two nights ago, we got our first decent rainfall of the year, traces of which can still be seen in moist spots on the ground.  Also, scientists are forecasting a 95% probability of heavy rains here this winter.    Still, that in no way dispels the drought, as illustrated by this picture from our hill (top is to the right, I can't find the gismo to rotate the display).  -Dale 

JoAnn Dyson (Dawson)

Re "Motown":  Laura, You are right.  The Cincinnati production was terrific.  Saw it at the Aronoff with my cousin (Kathy Burlew, WHHS '67). The crowd was quite enthusiastic.  I'm in Cincinnati on family matters and had never been in the Aronoff. 

This was my 2nd time seeing "Motown".  I 1st saw it this past spring in Los Angeles (at another beautiful theater).  Talk about an enthusiastic LA crowd!!  The audience in Cincinnati was sedate in comparison.  I couldn't believe this was an audience of mostly people well beyond 50.  The production is well worth seeing.

And thanks Ann for posting the picture of the WHHS Divas.  That was a fun day.  So great to see so many.

Philip Spiess

Murdock:  Actually, you were naked in class one day.  Fortunately for you, it was the late '50s-early '60s, and all of us had a civilized upbringing -- so we were too polite to mention it.

Bruce Fette

Dale,

That Pine Tree looks very unhappy. I hope for its recovery.

Larry Klein

Update on the historical first season of WHHS Varsity Girls Golf:

Two weeks ago we had our first-ever winning match over Winton Woods.  This week we had our first-ever ECC Conference win vs Anderson (guaranteeing that we won't finish last in the conf.).  We also had our first-ever TIE this week with Clermont NE.

Katie Hallinan is undefeated for the season as match medalist with 11 for 11 so far, and is only 0.07 strokes off the Greater Cincinnati girls HS record average of 36.10.  She leads the city rankings.

We have two more matches and the ECC Tournament before beginning the run to state on Oct 5th at Walden Pond.  Three of our girls never touched a club before our practices began in July this year, one has played only a year and a half, and Marlee, our #2, was the best 8th grader last year on the JH team.

Here's the team with "the old coach" in the middle.

L-R: Frosh Marlee Terry, Soph Lexi Wallace, Jr Sidnei Gibson, "CoachK2", Soph Katie Hallinan, Soph Grace Hall, Frosh Delia Washington