Got time for a short story?
This one is distinctly weird – and so strange that I’ve not only decided to share it with you, but also throw it open to interpretation. It’s that out of the ordinary…
Remember, this is a dream…but it’s quite remarkable because of its contents. Here goes….
I’d been with a group of friends…we’d been fishing.
Going into the dream, I remember smelling…was it….yes, wet clothing and salt air…and my long love of the sea had come back. It was from this “drifting off” point on the edge of sleep that I found myself with friends on a boat, working on engine problems that were quickly resolved.
The river we were on was like nothing I’ve ever been on; that includes a fair stretch of water on both coasts, the intercoastal and so forth. Wide, deep, and slow. Wonderful river.
The boat ran sweet and we were cruising along, about 25-miles an hour for a while. The river didn’t have a name, but like I said, it was wide, slow, and deep. Half the width of the Mississippi in places. Much like those backwaters out west of Vicksburg, MS, if you’ve flown low and slow over the area. It’s a place where low-income boatie types park floating this ‘n that’s and call it home.
But it wasn’t that river. This one had more (and larger) overhanging trees. The lighting, though daylight, had a kind of Gothic vibe to it. Not unlike the lighting effects in the TV series “Gotham.”
Presently, it was time to go to work and I found myself at an airport talking with the pilot of a twin-engine aircraft. He was telling me about his recent flights as a pilot assigned to fly into the vicinity of UFO’s when they appeared.
Not to challenge them, but to gather data for a low-key government operation that I (in the dream) was part of. The “group” was known only as “the NRE” and although the name was not clear as to what it actually stood for, it was definitely a national resource on externalities. Hmm…this begins to get interesting.
“I’ve flown how many missions? I can’t tell you,” the pilot was telling me. “I know I have flown a lot of them and on most of them when I get close enough) I just sort of feel like I’m going through something syrupy and then land the airplane back at base. It’s only then that I wake up and recall what I’ve gone – the flying part – in any detail.”
About then, someone came up to us and pointed up. A tiny pinpoint of light, though brighter than a star, could be made out.
The pilot got into the left seat of the aircraft and I sat behind him on what was a bench-type seat. There was no copilot needed on this flight. From my vantage point in the read of the place, the front window was like a large, flattened oval.
We took off, beginning to climb through pattern altitude, the plane flying normally…
Then all of a sudden, we found ourselves back on the ground, outside the airplane wondering how the hell we got there.
That “other person” – the one who had pointed out the tiny light at the beginning of our mission – came back into the picture and pointed up.
There, not more than 500 feet above us was a circular UFO against a bright starry background. It was not a flat saucer-shape. It had some depth to it. Perhaps 50-feet across and maybe15-feet high, with an almost angular look to the vertical part, not the “soft edged” looking UFO look.
As I looked up, I remember thinking “Oh my God…that’s where our time went.” I felt my heart racing and a bit of panic but try as I would, no further details of the flight after climb-out could be recalled by either me or the pilot. We “knew” that we wouldn’t have much to show for this “recon” mission.
Suddenly, the scene changes. I’m in an ultra-modern hotel, looking for a friend who I was supposed to have a drink with. They were nowhere to be found. Since they’d no-showed on me, I decided to do some shopping and sightseeing.
The town was a semi-familiar one (from past dreams). There no cars, people walked everywhere, and the city was built on a gently sloping hill. At the top of the hill were some government offices, and then as you went down the gentle slope to the next “block” there was a large museum.
The museum was odd in that it didn’t have small artifacts but instead the exhibits were large murals with again somewhat Gothic colors and lighting (high contrast, low light levels). Outside, going down hill opposite the federal buildings was a large, open, paved area from which you could see the rest of the city spread out before you.
It seemed perfectly natural to take off my shoes and go barefoot because it was what people did in this place. I left them in this open area.
Going down the hill I entered familiar department stores with odd technology at every turn. I didn’t buy anything, but it was more a shopping and orientation trip./ I remember that was seemed to me like the latest and greatest of high tech video equipment was shoved into an “old merchandise” area in one corner of the ground floor. It was understood (though I can’t tell you how) that this was the “old way” of doing things.
Becoming bored, as much as anything, I went outside and it had started to rain. My feet were becoming cold so I walked up to the public area to retrieve my shoes.
I worried while walking (and getting wet from the rain) whether they would be there. Perhaps someone would have stolen them by now?
But they hadn’t. As luck would have it, there was something of an overhanging roof on the front of the museum and one shoe was dry, while the other was wet, but they were both about 20-30 feet from where I’d left them.
Rather than walk around the museum and up the hill, I decided to go through the museum. Unfortunately, though, it was closing time and beginning to get dark. “You can’t go through here, sir…”
There was a ladder in the background and people were clustered around it. “What about them?”
I explained that I was on official business and after some discussion, he decided to let me pass; he hadn’t comprehended that I was working for the government and was on my way to the government building up the hill.
Now, the scene changes.
I’m with a female, though not Elaine. We had arrived at a secret NRE facility that was built – bunker-like – into the side of a hill.
The side of the hill was regularly shaped, like the side of a pyramid and there was no sign of any opening. So I was watching this female figure I was with when all of a sudden she took a couple of steps and literally threw herself sideways and almost horizontal at the side of the pyramid and quickly disappeared.
This was sure odd! So I decided to try it myself,
As I did, and at the exact moment of what I thought would be impact, the hard surface of the pyramid’s face became like fabric and I sort of melted through it.
Only to discover that I had landed on a great form-fitting plastic cot of some kind. There were depressions, so there was no chance of falling off – legs fit into troughs and so on.
In a moment, an attendant appeared and gave me two injections in my right leg. One about 2-inches up from the ankle and the other about 2-inches down from the right knee.
Again, now sure how this “knowing” was happening, I accepted it was something that needed to be done “for security” and that the outside of the pyramid had been instantly transformed back to a hard-as-diamond surface instantly as we we passed through it.
As I got up to go into the interior of the building, the (security attendant?) handed me a broken piece of gray plastic. “Souvenir for you…it’s what the security eggs come in…” he explained. The what???
I then woke up wondering who the NRE was and how I could have missing time – inside a dream.
Even now, that other world seems familiar yet distant at the same time.
It is said in physics that whole universes can exist right next door to ours and that some people can transit “between the worlds” as reported in many books. It’s rare but there, though often in fiction.
Louis L’Amour’s novel The Haunted Mesa touches on this “leakage between the worlds” as the hero in the book goes through a portal – an ancient kiva to be more precise about it – and enters another realm.
If you haven’t read the book, a plot spoiler can be found on Wikipedia here.
It makes an interesting story, to be sure. But it leaves open an interesting problem:
Are there doorways into other worlds, other realities and universes other than the one we share over coffee this morning? And if there are, might kivas and dreams be two ways to enter them?
Even more tantalizing is the report this week of a “UFO” that appears to materialize to watch a spacewalk.outside the International Space Station.
We’re presented with data suggesting that perhaps in the space between worlds, there may be a set of “referees” and “watchers who in other literature might have been called angels…or demons.
One thing is obvious: It is a real outlier in my personal history to have “missing time” in a dream! Not quite sure what to make of it….
Write when you break-even
George george@ure.net