Have you ever gone to bed with a problem weighing on your mind and awakened with the answer? Popular wisdom suggests that your subconscious was working while you slept and dug up the solution. I believe the subconscious is where old memories go to hibernate.
"Traveling By Train" is a short fantasy story I wrote back in the early 90s that found a home in multiple publications. I even turned it into a screenplay. It was about a widower and his young son who return to the old family homestead for Christmas one year. The gimmick in my story was a model Lionel train that ran backwards and could take the father back in time to his childhood. In writing the story, that kind of happened to me.
As the father and son walk into the house, they're greeted by the man's elderly mother and by a friendly yellow Labrador retriever. Petting the dog, the father exclaims in surprise, "Dixie. It can't be." Or words to that effect. The Lab looks just like the man's dog from his childhood, but the animal had been dead for years. Mom agrees that the dog looks just like his beloved childhood pet, but she assures him the dog is a recent addition to the household.
Of all my pets, I never had a dog or any other animal named Dixie. Around the time I wrote the story, my ex- wife had a cat by that name, and I always assumed that's where I got the name of the yellow Lab. (Naming a dog after a cat. I know: sacrilege.) The story was cobbled up out of my nostalgia-tinged imagination, but it turns out the dog scene was likely inspired by another piece of childhood fiction.
One of my favorite shows as a kid was "Yancy Derringer," one of the many westerns of 1958. But because it was set in New Orleans, I suppose we should call it a "southern." It starred Jock Mahoney in the title role and an actor known as X Brands, who played his mute Pawnee partner, Pahoo. A one- season wonder, the show's gimmick was the four- barreled derringer the hero kept concealed in his hat.
(Fun Fact Break: A former top stuntman, Mahoney had also played the title role in the syndicated series "The Range Rider" from '51 to '53, and he even played Tarzan in two movies in the early 60s. He was also known for being Sally Fields' stepfather. Now back to our story.)
In the single Yancy Derringer episode included in the DVD collection, Derringer goes home to the family plantation outside of New Orleans for Christmas. His late father had buried a mysterious treasure somewhere on the grounds and the location was secured in a secret place. Of course, some bad guys are after it.
Yancy enters the house and is reminiscing with the old black butler when he hears the baying of a hound outside. He says that it sounds like Dixie, but he hadn't seen the dog in seven years. He assumed he was dead.
Sure enough, Dixie is alive and well, and the Bluetick Coonhound comes bounding through the front door to greet our happy hero. An important plot point is that the location of the treasure is engraved on the metal of Dixie's collar.
My ears sharpened to points when I heard the dog's name. Holy Tara, Batman! A long-lost dog named Dixie. Thought to have been dead. A happy reunion at the family home. At Christmas. In my story, the childhood Dixie makes an appearance, too, thanks to the time-traveling train. That had to be where my scene came from! The fact that Derringer's Dixie was a male Coonhound and not a female Lab is irrelevant. He was a dog!
That scene had been buried in my skull for more than 35 years when I wrote the story in the early 90s. While watching the episode just last week, I could recall nothing of it from my childhood. In fact, I can remember no incident or scene from any other episode of the show either. (Maybe it wasn't such a favorite after all.) Not having seen the show for fifty years, forgetting much of it is not surprising. But that must be where the dog scene came from. It's simply too close.
To my readers who are fledgling scribblers, such things happen to writers occasionally. Not to worry, it's not theft or plagiarism or anything other than a trick of memory. What happened to me is not that different from using something in a story that actually happened in real life, even though you might not be sure where the bit came from. The scene came to me as a result of things I either like or miss. Animals. Family. Christmas. It was the perfect answer to what I needed in the story, and my subconscious provided it.
Now if I had done such a thing consciously, it would have been borderline plagiarism, especially if I had been crass enough to not even change the dog's name. No, this scene came unbidden from the recesses of my past to fill a creative need in the present. Within my fictive arsenal, this was the ideal blend of inspiration and memory, and my subconscious pulled the trigger.
Author Resource:
Jay Speyerer has been a writer, a speaker, and an educator for more than 30 years, successfully helping people achieve their communication goals in memoir writing, e-mail, cross-cultural communication, and presentation skills. Want to get a better handle on those buried memories so you can tell your story? Find out how at his web site: => http://www.jayspeyerer.com
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