Dreams:Sometimes they're just shadows, inside closets, inside corners of the mind where the thoughts of what-could-have-been are kept.

But then sometimes, a door opens - and out they pour.

Janelle Masters, 60, had always dreamed of being a singer and performer while growing into adulthood in the 1960s - in the time of Dylan and Baez and others.

And her mom, who played piano while Masters strummed a guitar, predicted her daughter would write songs.

But she remembers telling her mom, "no," that wasn't going to happen.

And the closest Masters got to creating music was in her poetry as she took the practical route and became an English teacher after leaving her hometown of Niobe, population 32.

Teaching started in New Town, then in Thailand through the Peace Corps, then Florida at a vocational school, and when her mom became sick, she returned to North Dakota to teach, first at Turtle Mountain and then at Bismarck State College 24 years ago. Now, she's BSC's dean of faculty and has her dream home in the country, a couple of acres north of Mandan, most of it left as natural habitat. And she pursues outdoor interests like gardening, kayaking and birding. Her home's decor includes numerous framed bird photos, and birding books are on end tables. Spotting a white ibis one day - a Florida bird, that for some crazy reason was in a North Dakota wetland south of Tuttle - was a major, remarkable moment. "That was a great day,"she cooed.

And so this was her life.

But it was in 2005, when Masters was getting closer to retirement, that she realized her mom was right.

She began writing songs, a pile of them.

Something clicked her into songwriting overdrive when she was watching director Martin Scorcese's documentary, "No Direction Home," about singer Bob Dylan's early career.

"I got into a mode and I couldn't get out of it,"she said. "I couldn't stop. Everything turned into songs for six months."

Hearing someone in the college's library say, "Everyone is born with a broken heart,"turned into a song. She wrote down the phrase and then couldn't stop. She wrote the song on her way home, writing on a tablet on the passenger seat while she drove. "Not a good thing to do,"she said.

And songs would come to her while she was sleeping.

"I'd get up in the middle of the night and write … " she said.

The songs didn't just sit on the page.

She had friends who were musicians, and with words and chord progressions on paper, and after a couple of practice runs, they took them into a Mandan recording studio. They recorded them through without stopping.

"I didn't want them to be that polished," she said.

Masters says she likes more of a raw sound.

While giving a recent talk at the Unitarian Unversalist Fellowship she played a song, and they wanted another one, so she played another. And someone in the audience indicated she could do this professionally it she wanted.

She said something to the effect that she doesn't have much time, now. It's 2007 and she's 60.

But the songs keep coming, while she's sleeping, and she's still writing them down. And so, who knows?

Her first song, "It's Happening Now," has made it on a listing of anti-war songs on singer Neil Young's Web site:http://www.neilyoung.com/lwwtoday.

The song starts out:

"Left dead in your crib

Left dead in the hall

Left with nothing at all

The world in steep flames

The world in a flood

We're all knee deep in blood

We're all knee deep in blood…"

For some of her other songs, she has certain people picked to sing them, if she could only get them interested - singers like Gillian Welch, Faith Hill and the duo Big & Rich.

Her first and only CD, so far, is called "Out of a Troubled Sky,"and all but one of the songs on it are based on her life or the lives of people she knows.

She said her favorite song, "This, Because Then I Didn't know What to Do (For Rosa),"is based on a train trip through the South she took when she was 15. She said she witnessesd three different instances of African-American women being humiliated.

One incident was when a ticket man at a the Birmingham, Ala., train depot told a black woman in line in front of Masters to step aside so he could help Masters first. Asecond was when a black woman drinking out of a "for whites only"drinking fountain was spotted doing it by a police officer and was escorted to the "colored" drinking fountain.

Another was when Masters was on a train. She had been talking with a black woman sitting across from her who had told her she was on her way to her brother's funeral. And when it was the woman's time to get off the train, Masters remembers the porter helping the woman get her suitcase down, but not before he had covered the handle with a rag before handling it. Something he didn't do for the white people's bags, she noticed.

"I felt guilty that I didn't do anything, but I didn't know what I was supposed to do,"Masters said.

She remembers the woman looked down, humilitated. As the woman got off the the train, Masters said she expressed condolences for her brother. Couldn't think of what else to do.

But she hasn't forgotten. And now others won't forget. She's doing what she can. In song.

(Reach reporter Virginia Grantier at 250-8254 or at virginia.grantier@bismarcktribune.com.)