I can’t stop writing up dreams

I dream I am killed in World War II.  Or do I?  What I remember, vividly, is dreaming that I am in a bar, relating to someone the story of how I was killed in World War II, and in that dream I have a vivid recollection of the event.  I am proud of my war story in the dream, my patriotic death.  I am mostly oblivious to the most glaring problem in my retelling of this tale, even after setting aside the fact that World War II ended 26 years before I was born – though some inkling scratches at the back of my mind the whole time.  My recollection, of dying, in the dream is so vivid.  Our plane is pierced repeatedly by big ship-mounted guns almost as soon as we lift off the deck of the carrier.  I see everything from my improbable ball turret on top of the right wing, a thing I’m quite sure never existed, and doesn’t the rest of the plane look a little like that Nazi prototype stealth jet that made the rounds on the internet a little while ago?  The plane breaking up, massive flaming debris, the world whirling, everywhere ships, planes, explosions, smoke.  The ocean rising immensely to slap me into oblivion.

When I wake  it is still so vivid that a little part of me almost believes it.  Somehow… But no, I don’t need to do math or ponder my pathetic uncertainty as to the exact date of the end of the war (’45 or ‘46 I guess: it could be worse) – I know my parents were basically my son’s age when the war ended.  My mother’s father was in the Navy.  Didn’t happen.  But I wonder, did I dream the death, and then dream of telling its story?  Or did the death memory come packaged with the dream, did it never occur as a standalone event?  Does it matter?  Is a dream memory within a dream any less (or more) of a dream than a dream event?  Does everyone dream these weird nested paradoxes and recursions?  I have periodically experienced such distortions in dreams for as long as I can remember.  I remember as a child waking up in San Diego to the smell of pancakes cooking, a treat, then later sitting staring into an empty fireplace thinking that you couldn’t tell when you were dreaming that you were dreaming, so any number of days I thought I remembered might be dreams.  Then I woke up, another morning.  The same morning?  No pancakes.  Could this recollection be real? I would have been between four and five, again my son’s age now.  It’s entirely possible I dreamed the whole thing.  Though I couldn’t begin to guess when, or where.

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jul 10, 2009 at 3:05 PM