Building Outdoor Field Stone Ovens Dream
On January 16th, about 4 AM I awoke from an interesting dream where I helped my step father build two waysides with stone ovens. Strangely, Kathy Lewan had posted a photo of her son’s brick oven later that morning on Facebook.
1 Lewan Outdoor 
Oven
Building Outdoor Field Stone Ovens Dream
The dream seemed to take place in an alternate reality. Or perhaps it is a vision of something coming to America in the future, where calamity strikes and communities band together, to survive after the infrastructure has fallen. Timing was different, as well, in that I was mid to late forties in age and my step-father was only about a decade older, and much healthier than he had been in real life.
Even though I didn’t see my home I could remember how it looked. We had a house and barn with electrical wiring, but we did not have electricity. We had vehicles, but gas was so scarce that most of the time they sat unused. People mostly walked or used horses. In the community where I lived, several farmers would form a collective and help each other with some projects like making hay or harvesting oats and corn. We still had our own individual daily chores, but would have community social events throughout the spring, summer and fall where we would have group barn-raising, butchering, and threshing “bees”. At times we would use hand-tools and other times use horses to draw harvesting implements that had been modified to work by horse-power instead of tractors.
The dream started with myself, my stepfather and two local farmers putting together a wayside that was central to our farms, but our farm was much farther away. We were all wearing bib overhauls and scruffy work clothes. My step-father and the two other farmers were working on the two field-stone ovens. I was using hand hand-tools to remove brush, cut grass and shovel gravel. I was pretty much working independently.
The shape and size of the ovens was closer in size to the unit built by Kathy’s son in the photo above, but the ones in my dream were made of field stones like the one in the picture below.
Oven built of field stone.
There was a place underneath to store wood and kindling and a second section just above it to build a fire. The grilling area of the ovens in my dream was much larger than the cooking area of either of the pictured outdoor ovens.
My step-father and his friends finished working on the stone oven and moved up the road about a block where they were working on another wayside. Meanwhile, I finished cutting grass and spreading out the gravel around the oven area; I moved up the road to join the others. I walked up the road to the other wayside, which was about a block away, and on the opposite side of the road. That project was farther along. The oven there had a roof over it. It also had a horizontal bar with an attached windlass so that you could spit chunks of meat and broil them.
There was also a pump-jack well.
This wayside also had a fire-pit ringed with large rocks. The two farmers were sitting around the campfire with my step-father waiting for the coffee to boil. Another farmer, from down the road, but in the opposite direction, had stopped by, and was adding to the wood pile, before he joined us at the fire-ring to wait for the coffee. He waved at me as I joined others around the campfire.
The two farmers who had helped my step-father earlier, lived just up the road, across the way from each other, within easy walking distance of the two waysides. We lived on our own farm at the edge of the community. The local farmers were going to hang around and share coffee with us until my mother Esther, and my sister Pamela, came to pick us up. I don’t know if they had fuel to bring a vehicle or if they were bringing a horse and wagon. I just knew that they were coming to get us and would bring us back the next day, after we did our own daily chores, to finish the wayside project. I had more gravel work and grass trimming to do at this park. My stepfather and two different farmers from the community were going to help him make the top for the other wayside oven that we had worked on in the morning.
End of dream.