Hen Chronicles: When chickens visit slumberland

My wife Liz claims I can be somewhat obsessive about our chickens. She does seem to have the preponderance of the evidence on her side. Actually, she probably could prove her case beyond a reasonable doubt. So what happened a few nights ago was not at all surprising, and probably inevitable.

I dreamed about the hens.

There was a lot of rain in the dream, so before I tell you what transpired in slumberland, let me start off with a bit of background information about our chicken housing arrangements.

Our coop and pen

The pen and the coop are not located atop a hill or on high ground, so when it rains heavily, I start to worry. Barring an actual flood, the coop itself is never at risk because it sits on stilts, about a foot above the ground. But the adjacent pen is at ground level, which is where the potential problem lies.

In our two years of keeping chickens, the pen has never filled with water, although one corner of a nearby garden bed floods from time to time. For one thing, I cover the pen with a tarp whenever it rains. And the pen's perimeter is lined with wood chips, which do a pretty good job of absorbing rainwater before it can seep into the pen at ground level. If a small puddle does develop in the pen, as sometimes happens, I pour sand in it to dry it out. The ever-curious hens seem to find that process entertaining.

Even in the worst spring storms, we’ve managed to keep the pen fairly dry. In any case, “the girls,” who do not like getting their toes wet, always have the option of retreating into the coop if things get too muddy for their liking in the pen.

All of which means the risk of serious flooding probably is more of an unfounded fear than an actual threat. But it does preoccupy me whenever the forecast calls for a lot of rain in a short period of time, or over several consecutive days.

So, what happened in my sleep?

I dreamed that I awoke before dawn. It was raining. Hard. Grabbing a flashlight, I headed outside in the dark to check on the coop, which is at the far end of our backyard. Wide-eyed with disbelief, I discovered that a deluge had transformed the entire yard into a lake, complete with wind-churned waves. The water was so deep that the coop was partially submerged.

And what of the chickens? They were still locked in the coop for the night! In one of those fanciful twists that are commonplace in dreams, there was a sump pump in the coop, and it was ejecting water at a furious pace.

Did the hens survive? I never found out, because I woke up before I could reach the coop.

It was a silly dream, but frightening, and I was greatly relieved to escape from it. In fact, it was even worse than my default bad dream, which I’ve had too many times to count.

In that one, I’m still a newspaper reporter (as I was for 30 years, until I retired). I'm fighting a looming deadline, trying to fill holes in a page-one story that will never get written on time. My editor's impatience is matched by my frustration and anxiety. Should we hold the story for another day? Is that even an option? What if some other news outlet beats us to it in the interim? The clock on the wall seems to grow larger and more intimidating with each passing minute.

At least the editor in that dream has never taken the form of a chicken. Not the kind with feathers and a beak, anyway. Although, come to think of it, I have known editors who laid their share of eggs.