Will and El Nichols dreamed three times - this ain't second-handed, this is first-handed - they dreamed three nights straight that there was an iron-handled drawer buried up to Tulpehocken, on the road that goes from the Joe Holloway Field and comes out to the High Crossing. They dreamed that there was a box there -- with an iron drawer in it -- near an old-fashioned walnut tree right along the road. Neither one told the other that they had dreamed anything.

One morning, they got up and Will said to El, "I'm going up to Tulpehocken."

"So am I," said El. They went up, and dug, and found a box full of buckskin bags full of gold coins. I've seen the hole where they dug that out. They would never tell me how much gold they got, but they had nothing before, and they had money the rest of their lives, and they had it when they died. They lived down here to Bulltown. People used to put gold coins in buckskin bags and bury them all over these woods.

SOURCE: Dream Scene Magazine, a zine by Dan Holzner, (final issue 1996). Unpaged; c.20 pages in. Holzner's title. Recounter's name withheld, but, unusually, the dreamers are named (presumably because they're long dead).

EDITOR'S NOTE

This frustratingly brief account is, like nearly all of Dream Scene articles, anonymous. The dialect suggests an older printed source containing oral history, not a 1996 written submission to Dream Scene. The list of contributors at the end includes two fair candidates: "Lee Dessaux, Hobo" and "Gregory Hischak, Farm Pulp", another zine.

As well as the delay between interview and publication in Dream Scene, the events happened many years before the interview; Will and El's good fortune apparently lasted decades. My best guess is that this took place in the Great Depression. It's only a guess; I can't find Will or El in genealogical records (not that I'm patient enough to dig deep).

But as a dream-historian, I suspect a different, much older source. Compare this tale to the twin dreams in Swaffham. That tale, apparently historical (that dug-up treasure helped renovate the local church) dates to England in the 1460s! Appalachian folklore and songs have roots in English or Scottish lore, and the parallels are suggestive--two dreamers, zipped lips, a squarish treasure-box buried under a food-bearing tree. Also note that dreaming three times is a sign of psychic or true dreams in European and Classical folklore, hinting again at Old World origins. So I have my doubts. Just a tall tale?

Yet our source names names so openly! Genealogy.com shows the Nichols family in Chester County (Tulpehocken and Bulltown are near Reading, Pennsylvania) goes back at least 200 years. In a tiny Appalachian community, would you lie about the source of your neighbors' money? For print?

--Chris Wayan

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