Ship Wreck, Tiled Version #1 (S.Calhoun, 2014)
Dream #1
I’m driving a winding road on a nice summer day and I drive out of the countryside and then I’m on a winding road by a big lake and the road starts to wind down toward this coast.
I sense I’m going a little too fast. Seems in control but I start on a big turn just as a village and pier come into sight. I see a big white yacht and and a group of sharply dressed grown-ups. This distracts me and the next thing the car flies off the road, flies off the hillside and heads right toward the yacht.
I don’t experience the actual crash to any dramatic degree.
Seen changes. I’m a very old man in a small house. Our car Sassy is very old and on my lap. There is a sign among the picture on the wall and it says: 2044.
I slowly become oriented to the room I’m in. A dark haired woman in a maid’s uniform is standing off to the side.
A crippled man comes in the front door. I shake his hand and he turns and tosses his cain away.
An old lady come in and tells me she can’t hear anything. I touch her ears, and say to her, “How about now.”
She nods her head.
I turn to the cat (Sassy) on my lap and say, “It always surprises me every single time that I can do that.”
From behind me, the maid says: “It’s your atonement.” (The maid carries a substantive tone: sober, attentive, prepared. She’s pretty in a severe way, and middle-aged.)
When I look toward her, the sign now says 2050. I feel ninety-six years old too. The cat on my lap is very still, maybe coming to her end.
More people come to be healed one by one.
After a healed girl leaves, the maid comes up behind me and puts her hand on what I realize is a wheelchair, and pushes me through the front door onto a wide porch. There’s a line of hurting people waiting near the door. Yet, when she pushes me onto the porch, she says to me over my shoulder,
“Then there’s your other legacy to remember.” She turns the chair to the right and pushes it to the very edge of the porch.
At that, I look down the hillside. I hear music. It’s dusk. At the bottom of the hill I see an enormous colorful carnival with lots of people, and I can hear the sounds of the celebration as it carries from there to my front porch.
Dream #2
I.
I’m watching out a big main window on the second floor of a large club–it may be a yacht club–at an odd scene. Lots of people gathered on the 2nd floor porch and are looking up in the sky. I can see the glint and gleam of the sun on a clear day flashing and reflecting off small stuff floating in the sky.
I step outside into the crowd and look up. I see small metallic umbrellas. A boy next to me tugs on my pants and says: “they are robotic.”
I walk down the porch near of kids and observe the robotic umbrellas coming almost within reach. But then they stop and hover and gleam. Some seem to be copper, others silver or aluminum.
Suddenly, I’m struck that I need to go get my turntable. I fetch it and set it up on a small table on the far edge of the porch. I go back to get a record to play on it. When I return moments later, to my shock, the turntable is gone.
I shout to no one in particular but to the assembly of adults and kids, “Never mind the robots, somebody took my turntable!” I feel very upset and realize no one cares about my turntable.
II.
A bird’s eye view of me on a scooter, propelling myself down a suburban sidewalk. Attached to my waste is a yellow rope and it drags along a small wooden rectangular box. The box is the same dimensions as a shoe box, but twice as deep. It has no lid.The right side of the sidewalk is very rough and cracked and holes appear every now and then. It seems important enough to keep on that side of the sidewalk that I hale joggers in front of me to move left.
I come to a big intersection. I wait for the Walk signal. Other people come to the intersection. I ask several of the people, “Have you seen my turntable?”
Then, realizing I missed the Walk signal, I step out into the intersection. I feel lost for a moment. Then a police car rolls up and the officer jumps out.
“What are you doing in the road?”
“I’m waiting for the signal and looking for my turntable.”
“You’re breaking the law.”
He grabs me and forces me up against his car and pins me there with one hand. With the other he turns on his walkie talkie.
He makes a call.
“I’ve got a problem here and I’m going to make an arrest.”
Pause.
“It seems to me the person is disoriented and it’s probably a Code Between the Eyes.”
He pens the door and shoves me in the police car.
III.
At the station, I argue with the sergeant at the desk that there’s been a mistake. He tells me, “The officer is experienced and he says it’s a textbook case of insanity. He says you were going on and on about your turntable.”
I tell him I think somebody stile my turntable.
“The judge will determine what happened.”
The scene changes to a court room. It’s just me, the officer, a prosecutor, and a judge. The prosecution makes a case based in my missing the walk signal and then stepping into the intersection. The judge tells me its my turn.
I agree to the facts as stated, but then I say,
“This is the exact kind of case in which expert opinion is required. Both accounts agree, but, since I’m not insane, the conclusion differs.”
The judge responds, “I see this and I will gave you and the officer work it out.”
Now the officer and I sit at the classic steel table in an interrogation room.
He states the several facts in order. Each fact he asserts I respond by asking him,
“Have you ever done the same thing?”
He replies every time, “Yes, I have.”
Back in the court room, the judge calls the officer and me to the bench.
He states the following:
“We had two psychiatrists observe your mediation. Both, after some discussion in chambers, agree, that Calhoun is not insane. They both were impressed at Calhoun’s sane method of deconstructing his insanity, and so their expert opinion is that no insane person would be able to do the deconstruction Calhoun managed to do.”
I feel relieved. I turn the officer and tell him, “We’re not very different.”
The judge tells me that I am free to go.
This feels like a victory.
Dream #3
From above the scene unfolds as if shot from a helicopter: a huge mixed group of people is running between two brick walls, maybe about twenty feet wide, and the walls are set in a large field.
The perspective changes to pick me out of the crowd. I’m running with it. The walls are old and ten+ feet tall. The feel of the crowd is that they are motivated, compelled–I feel this about the crowd–and, yet, I do not know what is really going on.
Next the perspective is first person, through my eyes, at ground level, and amidst the crowd. The walls are slowly converging. The crowd slows down. I continue to the front where I come to a wooden door with a window in it. At the door, in the window, I see very clearly my reflection, except I’m a young man with long hair, maybe around twenty years old.
I’m impressed with the trick: I feel my current age but see a young man.
I open the door and start walking. People from the crowd come through the door and squeeze past mer and start running again. This passage between the walls is not the width of a doorway.
I kind jostles me as he passes me, and squirts by and starts running. Then I see he is being chased by a young man in black pajamas. I think he is a fundamentalist of some sort.
The narrow path looks to end up ahead at a wall perpendicular to the two walls. I walk fast and come to see the path ends and one can go left or right. I see the boy at this wall ahead. He jumps into a hole in the wall but cannot get through, and so there is just the site of his blue shorts, bare legs, red sneakers, and the man in in black reaching him.
The man in black stops and starts spanking the boy’s behind. I trot up next to him and ask him,
“What’s the problem?”
“The boy disagreed with me, so I’m punishing him.”
I get the man’s full attention, put my hand up, palms facing toward him. I tell him,
“Instead of punishing him, let’s pray. That is the best thing to do when you disagree.”
I went to my knees, as did the man in black. We started praying.
