Strange Dreams...

I was living in some little suburb of some weird dream version of Nashville that looked more like Taos, New Mexico, only greener, with mountains ringing the horizon. I'd get together with some neighbors every Monday night to play Scrabble, and among these neighbors were Johnny Carson and Kathy Lee Gifford. I borrowed the USB adapter for Johnny's Kindle and had to sneak it back into his house one Tuesday morning without waking up his Lhasa Apso and triggering a spastic barking fit.

There was an early Cold War propaganda film about the US Navy's powerful new fleet of supercarriers that were going to keep the Russian bombers away from our eastern seaboard, complete with five or ten Forrestal-class carriers starting in stern-to-stern star patterns and steaming away from each other while launching synchronized pairs of F8U and F3D fighters.

There were also these giant fixed pentagonal platforms, like carrier decks on oil rigs, that had five outward-facing catapults launching A4D Skyhawks. There was no way the aicraft could recover on those platforms. I guess they were supposed to shoot down Russian bombers and ditch or fly back to the mainland or something? The whole thing was like some Brobdingnagian techno-mechanical Esther Williams production.

Later, I was standing in a park overlooking the ocean. The slope down to the waters of the bay was covered in loose rock. There was a plane overhead, an early prototype jet with twin tails like a de Havilland Vampire, that came roaring across at treetop height. It had a red fuselage and yellow wings and empennage. We were watching one of the first jet flights in the U.S. and the plane was moving faster than anything anybody's ever seen. I remember I knew the pilot and waved as the plane streaked overhead.

The plane pulled straight up and over into a loop, and then roared straight down into the waters of the bay a few hundred yard away at full throttle. Debris went flying everywhere, including something skipping and bouncing into the rocks on the slope below us. Someone else in the park went scrambling down to get it as my brain processed what the lime-green missile I had just seen lodge itself in the rocks below was. "No, don't!" I yelled, "that's his helmet!" And yes, like the airborne song, his head was still inside.

And then some other stuff happened.

And then I woke up.

I realized I had just had a dream that would make Absolutely No Sense Whatsoever to a human living a hundred years ago.
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