Dream Time

I go through odd cycles of dream repetition: years after I’d moved I used to regularly dream that the town I grew up in was being leveled by a nuclear explosion. It would always start at a distance and then roll towards me from the horizon, with a crushing sense of inevitability.

More recently many of my dreams have forced me into having to board a futuristic plane.

(Sometimes it’s just for inter-city travel, sometimes it’s a shuttle that does local-system planet hopping, but it’s always the same craft.)

The machine is full of cream coloured plastic – the interior is likely my brain mashing together the planes and trains I’ve been in. Orange cloth shades cover the windows, which seem to be made of exceedingly thick plastic. The seats are blue with coloured flecks randomly distributed.

The plane body is similar to NASA’s shuttles, but its made of a gray metal, like a DC-3, and the wings, although swept back like the shuttle, are twice the size.

The plane takes flight from a long chromed-steel platform, with regularly spaced ribs that shorten as the strip continues.

The launch faces onto a huge bay, and every time we take flight we’re slammed with acceleration Gs – just before the left wing rips off, at which point we inevitably corkscrew into the water at an immense speed.