Being with Ashley Bryan in Islesford, Maine one Autumn Day
Foto of Ashley Bryan from the book, Beautiful Blackbird. Cropped and modified from an archival image found on the book’s back cover from Photographer Peter Ralston archival color ink print from 2010.
Awoke Sunday morning on the day before Labor Day from the strangest dream. The dream itself unfolded as a real, everyday depiction of normal reality. There wasn’t any fantasy, syfy weirdness, or dissolving boundaries between dimensions and destinations. The whole dream took place on Little Cranberry Island on the edge of Acadia National Park in the State of Maine. In this dream I lived in Islesford, a village or hamlet within the Town of Cranberry Isles. The town spans three main islands and a few small ones. It’s all part of Hancock County, too. And the weather was beautiful with the wistful nostalgia of long ago good times as Summer turned with the Wheel of the Year into Autumn.
Frost was in the air. The sun felt warm even with a sweater on. Twas early Fall still, but the leaves had already fallen from the hardwoods. More likely they fell due to recent high winds as much as from the chill. In this dream I walked and talked for long hours with the late Ashley Bryan. Yes, he’s been dead since February 2022. Never met the man, unfortunately. Indeed, I’ve not ever heard of this gentle genius until my own visit to Islesford, Maine, from Seattle, Washington.
Ashley Bryan, in my dream, looked like he does in the 2010 foto taken by Peter Ralston. He wore a sweater in the dream, tho, a Cardigan with a thick, puffy collar, as we rambled along Little Cranberry Island’s bucolic country lanes. We talked deeply for and about many topics. Strangely enough, however, I don’t recall any of our conversation. Don’t even remember hearing the sound of his voice even with my hearing aids on. It was as if we conversed in Silence, my first language, except I know we spoke and listened to one another. To me, this gentle giant of heart and mind was respectful, generous, courteous, and would move back and forth between stern clarity and exuberant gaiety. He was funny! He was serious! And he stood and walked in awe of the natural world around him as we passed thru it together. I don’t know what the personality of the man was like in real life back during his time on Earth, but the above described how he showed up in my dreamworld.
The sun shined low thru the trees in the chilly, late afternoon skies. At one point I WAS Ashley Bryan and was looking out thru his eyes. Time and space were different in this cosmic reality. Despite a moment of sharp, quick surprise, I quickly realized I was safe gazing at the world from inside of him looking out. It was a gift, I realized after the dream as I pondered this odd moment. It was Ashley’s gift to peer out into the world as he saw and experienced it.
Also, the year or number 1987 kept coming up, right before he moved to Little Cranberry year round in 1988 after his retirement from teaching at Dartmouth. I do not know what 1987 means in this context. Numbers rarely ever show up in my dreams.
No other people were apparent in this dream. Three were in the background out of sight, however, my wife Faithlyn and her close friends Isabel and Bryan. I could feel them energetically, but didn’t see them. They were just there out of sight. In our everyday reality, however, Faithlyn and I spend a wonderful week in Maine at Isabel and Bryan’s summer home on Little Cranberry Island. Also, within my strange dream I actually lived in Islesford year-round and ran a combination coffeehouse and bookstore, cozy and warm, somewhere up on the hill above The Docks. In real life there isn’t any such business, and I live on the other side of the continent in Shoreline.
I was quite taken by the man once I learned of him. Faithlyn actually met him at least twice. Once he sat down beside her when she visited the local Congregational church and helped her, a Deaf woman, follow along with the hearing people in their Bible readings. Isabel and Bryan have known him for years as they’ve spent summers there for ages. When I shared this dream with Isabel, she texted me back, “Oh wow, sounds interesting. In fact it does feel like fall season here already. Ashley Bryan is the sweetest man.”
The locals clearly revere him, and his former home is now a museum dedicated to his memory as a person, to the struggles he endured and persisted thru, and to his numerous accomplishments in education, the arts, and in building human connections. The local school is even named after him. He lived into his late 90s, although the last couple of years in Texas with surviving family members. The odd thing about all of this, is while I never even heard of him, I recognized him instantly when I learned of him and saw his pictures. What does this mean? Truly? I am unable to say. Perhaps it is merely unconscious acting out roles reflecting a nostalgic longing for what-might-have-beens, or perhaps there was a real psychic interchange beyond the edges of space and time as we know them today. Who is to say as we keep rolling back the frontiers of consciousness and psychospirituality?
I woke up from this dream puzzled by it. Obsessed over it, too. Faithlyn and I went out for brunch and ended up eating lunch at a local, yummilicious restaurant here in the Richmond Beach neighborhood of Shoreline, Washington. As I researched more of Ashley Bryan on my fone as Faithlyn admonished me to put it away, I texted Isabel my dream “lingers in my mind even now, & am wearing my Islesford Boathouse t-shirt. Weird, huh? Lol”
Wasn’t till a day later I realized the synchronicity of Faithlyn and I sitting down to eat at The Black Bird Cafe not far from the edge of the Salish Sea. Excitedly texted my wife, “Now I know why I felt so strange going to Black Bird Cafe on Sunday – because I’d just had the dream where was walking & talking in Islesford with the Beautiful Blackbird Man!”
Ashley Bryan based his work, “Beautiful Blackbird,” upon a Zambian folk tale highlighting the inspirational beauty and uplifting power of the color black as represented by blackbirds. In an odd sort of way, a different species, the red-winged blackbirds, were one of my favorite birds from my childhood in rural Virginia. And rediscovered them years later among the cattails growing along the edges of Green Lake in the middle of North Seattle.
Seems to me my dream may have been a form of time travel, a transtemporal connection of sorts between the living and the dead, to remember art and more. The human brain is a funny radio. May we always find ways to keep on flying, from thru the air across land and sea all the way to the stars and new worlds beyond.
The cover of the book that captivated me and somehow fostered a connection beyond the veil and between past and present.
William Dudley Bass
Sunday 6 September 2026
Monday 7 September 2026
Tuesday 8 September 2026
Shoreline/Seattle, WA
USA
Earth
Sol
Sources:
Ashely Bryan Center, https://ashleybryancenter.org/.
Farrington, Lynne, Curator and Editor. Beautiful Blackbird: The Creative Spirit of Ashley Bryan, University of Pennsylvania Libraries, Philadelphia, PA, 2023.
Landrigan, Leslie. “Ashley Bryan: The Main Man Who Showed The World Black Is Beautiful,” New England Historical Society, 2026: https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/ashley-bryan-the-maine-man-who-showed-the-world-black-is-beautiful/.
Copyright © 2026 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved with One Exception by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. The sole exception is the altered image from a © 2010 photograph by Peter Ralston. Thank you.