Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.
~Sigmund Freud
Growing up on our family dairy farm in upstate New York, I accepted that my oldest brother, John, wasn’t ordinary. For one thing, he didn’t like sugar. This peculiarity wasn’t a bad thing because John gave his Halloween candy to my brother Steve and me, while he enjoyed a cavity-free childhood. I also found it odd that John had little interest in sports, music, or movies. In fact, he seemed interested in only one thing: farming. John was the only person I knew, with the exception of my father, who enjoyed doing chores, including milking cows.
John knew each of our thirty cows at a glance and had names for many. But his favorite cow was Polly, a pretty Brown Swiss. John showed Polly many times at the county fair, where he enjoyed talking to people who stopped by the stalls to see her. As he groomed Polly, he explained that he preferred Brown Swiss cows because they gave chocolate milk. He was pleased when people believed him.
One morning when John was seventeen, he came to breakfast limping. He grabbed onto furniture along the way and winced when he tried to put down his foot.
“Why are you limping?” asked Mom.
“Polly stepped on my foot,” he said. “I think it’s broken.”
“You weren’t limping last night when you came in from milking,” she said. Her eyes narrowed. “When did this happen?”
“In the middle of the night,” he said. He grabbed the table and eased himself into his chair. “Oww! I just bumped my foot on the table leg.”
“You were milking in the middle of the night?” she said.
“I dreamed I was milking, and when I took the milking machine off Polly, she stepped on my foot hard.”
“Are you kidding?” I said. “A cow hurt your foot in a dream?” Steve and I both laughed. What a far-fetched excuse to get out of going to school.
“That’s right,” he said.
After breakfast, Mom examined John’s foot, but could not see any sign of injury — no redness, no swelling — but John continued to cry out in pain whenever she touched his foot. Mom told him he could stay home from school that morning on the condition that he saw the doctor. John agreed. I was beginning to believe he wasn’t faking his injury because John hated going to the doctor. The last time he had gone for a shot, he passed out in the waiting room just from thinking about the needle. I had to test his veracity.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “Maybe the doctor will give you a shot for the pain.”
“I don’t care,” he said, “as long as it helps.”
That did it. John was not faking this injury. Whether it made sense or not, his pain was real.
Later that morning, Mom took John to the doctor. The X-rays were negative and there was no sign of an injury. The doctor prescribed aspirin and told John to stay off his foot until it felt better. He gave him a pair of crutches.
When I saw John at school that afternoon, he was hobbling from class to class on his new wooden crutches. He had a heavy sock covering his injured foot. Whenever a classmate asked him what happened, he said, “A cow stepped on my foot.” This drew instant sympathy because everyone in a farming community knows that getting stepped on by a cow is a painful experience. When a horse steps on your foot, it picks its foot back up and continues on its way. But when a cow steps on your foot, the cow pushes off and slides its hoof across your foot, inflicting maximum pain. Apparently, cows do this even in dreams.
My brother Steve and I were not happy to have John laid up. Of course, we didn’t want him to suffer. After all, he was our brother. But the longer he was incapacitated, the longer we had to do his chores in addition to our own. We wished him a speedy recovery.
After three or four days of walking on crutches, John began to put weight on his injured foot. Within a week, he was well enough to resume his chores. We welcomed him back with a new appreciation for the work he did. But we also gave him the following admonition: “From now on, be careful what you dream.”
~D.E. Brigham
