Have you ever had a dream that was so real you couldn’t shake it?
Felt like maybe it was part of another life?
This is what happened to Richard Weaver, a gentleman who lives in New Smyrna Beach, Florida.
He started having recurring dreams a year or so ago. Dreams that came to him night-after-night sequentially, like a captivating saga that would unfold another chapter each night soon after he shut his eyes.
So, what do the dreams of an American octogenarian have to do with Trail you ask?
After all, Weaver lives 3,000 miles southeast in another country and has never been to the Silver City, that’s for sure.
Well here’s the interesting twist.
Though Weaver has never been west to Trail, or the western United States for that matter, his dream-story actually takes place in Trail.
Queue the Twilight Zone music.
No matter what you believe in spiritually, or if you’d rather brush this off as serendipity or simply coincidence, it really is rather extraordinary.
And now the story of his dream - with Trail as the backdrop - has been published in a book called, “A Dream That Needs to be Told!”
While the book of fiction recounts Weaver’s dreams in black and white text, the colourful tale was actually written by his New Smyrna Beach acquaintance named Randy Bateman.
Bateman says he wrote the book for his friend “because the incredible story just had to be told.”
Bateman called the Trail Times last week to reveal this interesting story (the book is available on Amazon but he is sending the Times a copy).
“To give you a background on it,” Bateman began. “I am an economist, so I don’t know much about writing except technical writing, and I’ve done a lot of that. So one of my associates knew that I wrote a lot and she knew this gentleman here in New Smyrna (Richard Weaver), he’s a really interesting guy. He’s 80 years old and dyslexic, so he can’t write himself, he only went through elementary education.”
Regardless of Weaver’s formal education, Bateman says the man is brilliant and has done very well for himself in life.
“But he had these series of dreams that started a year ago,” Bateman continued. “When he woke up from this dream he told his wife the story the following morning. When he went to bed again that night the dream started again where it left off the previous day. This went on for a month or so and he was tell his wife about them,” Bateman said.
“He didn’t want it to continue but said, ‘I was afraid if it didn’t continue I’d never hear the end of the story!’”
Fast forward a few months, Weaver connected with Bateman to talk about writing a book.
“He told me the story and it was so intriguing, not just the way it came but also how it ended,” Bateman shared. “So I said I’d be happy to work with him on this book.”
The story is set in the 1940s. It revolves around Daniel, and his journey into becoming a man. He leaves Montana on his way to Vancouver, but ends up in Trail. This is where the story unfolds.
“We worked on it for about six months and we have it published on Amazon, ebooks, Kindle and those kinds of things,” said Bateman. “Essentially it started out to be an adventure story and it turned out to be much more an adventure romance almost like Romancing the Stone,” he added.
“But it was so funny because (Weaver) has never been to Montana, (where the story begins) British Columbia or the Rocky Mountains.”
newsroom@trailtimes.ca
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