When I was about five years old I
had a dream that I remember clearly to this day. I was operating a little peddle
car designed to look like a surrey carriage. Peppermint striped canopy. Bench
seats. This toy car existed in the waking world, but I was peddling it in a
dream. My sister—older by a year and a half—was sitting on the front bench. I steered and cranked away happily in the back seat.
For no reason at all that I can
recall now I turned down a short, steep driveway maybe a block from our home. A
bad man lived there, in the dream. In the waking world no such man or driveway
existed.
We picked up speed going down that
steep driveway and crashed into the bad man’s garage door. My sister sustained a serious injury. I had to get home and get help right away.
But when I turned around, the
short, steep driveway was gone. What stretched out before me now was an endless,
winding road. And all along its length other roads came off it like millipede legs.
For at least two years after that I found
myself every night in a dream on that winding road trying to get home. And
every night I would try a different branch and every night I would have
nightmares. Witches, giant trolls, werewolves, Frankenstein’s monster. Every
night.
This was not a recurring dream. It
was a serial dream and the crash was the pilot episode, so to speak. The dream
never repeated itself. I would find some new terror each night on each new turn I tried as I searched for home and help.
But after around two years of
finding myself every single night on that road I became aware of the times that
I was asleep. The terror became my cue. If I found myself abjectly terrified I’d ask
myself if I was dreaming. And when I found myself on the road, I knew I was. And
I would either wake myself up, or ever better, just fly away and have some fun
adventure. I had learned to lucid dream.
Eventually the serial dream stopped when I forgot the name of the bad man in it. It returned briefly when I remembered the name, and went away again forever when I lost the name for good.
__________
Years later, in my twenties, I
read about lucid dreaming and realized I had already experienced it. But I
wanted to again, and so I began keeping a dream journal as part of that effort.
I used a mini-tape recorder (this was way before digital). And odd things
happened.
I woke up one morning and as was
my new habit I spoke my dream memories of the previous evening into the
recorder. I had been in a car with a coworker named Keith. In the waking world
I never saw Keith outside of work and had never spoken with him by phone. But
in the dream we had been driving through an accident scene in which another
coworker name Jody had crashed her car. We were looking for an icy spot, which
was absurd because this was Houston, Texas we were in. Jody was someone else I
never had contact with outside of work. Neither of these two people was
particularly special to me. Just folks I knew from work and had no strong feelings
about.
The following afternoon, for the first and only time, the real
Keith called me. He called to say that Jody had been in a car accident and that some people from work were going to the hospital and donating blood and would I like to help out.
As you might imagine, I thought
that was a hell of a coincidence. I probably would have missed it had I not
recorded the dream on tape.
__________
Not long after that happened,
maybe a month or so, I recorded my recollections of another dream. In this one
I was standing outdoors and knee deep in water all around me. I watched something flying through the sky high
above. I thought it might be some kind of experimental aircraft because it
seemed to be both rocket and plane. In the dream it exploded midair.
Then the scene suddenly shifted. I
was a hundred feet or so in the air myself, looking down. I saw helmeted astronauts
in their pressure suits bobbing in the water below me. I thought I counted
seven of them.
I had the tape recorder set to
auto start whenever it detected sound. That’s why it turned on three days later to
the ringing of my phone. On the same tape as the rocket/plane explosion dream,
again three days later, you can hear me answer the phone, exclaim something
like, “No, no,” and turn on the TV news.
The next thing you hear on the
tape is the story on the news of the space shuttle Challenger exploding with all aboard
lost.
I don’t believe in the supernatural. I don’t know how or why information could travel back in time and
enter a dream. I find it interesting that the “visions” I had were not literal,
but were more of the nature of just incorporating bits of truth into a
scene that never actually happened.
I want to say it’s just chance.
That given billions of people and hundreds of billions of dreams, someone is
bound to experience something like this.
I just don’t believe that. And yes, I still have the tape.