The Dreamer

The dream always starts the same. I’ve had it a thousand times. Maybe more. I am in a single seater jet flying in sunrise or sunset enbalmed in the sensation of the forward glide. There’s an eiree glow in the cockpit, but everything seems to be the way it should be. Suddenly there’s a violent shudder and the fuselage shrieks as if it’s going to split in half. I grab the stick to steady the stricken craft. I can smell kerosene filling the cockpit, it runs down the floorboards beneath me like a stream of icy cold sweat. Soon electric sparks begin to ignite and I fight frantically to bail out. I pull hard on the ejection cable, but nothing happens…pull again…nothing. Then fire breaks out and licks me like glass shards…Just then a dwarf. Yes a small compressed man. He always turns up and there and then. I realise, I am in a dream.

Last night I had the very same dream. Only on this occasion. I don’t grab the stick or for that matter even pull on the ejection cable. I do something quite strange that I have never done before. I lean back into the small of my seat. It’s not resignation of what seems to be my impending doom. Not paralysis either that comes with fear or futility. No. That’s not whats really behind my inexplicable inaction. truth is I haven’t really figured it out yet. Maybe for the very first time in this nightmare… I have made a decision to step back and contemplate the smallness of my courage. I don’t even try to fight the fire. I feel the pain, but I don’t recoil. Instead I take a deep breathe of the acrid vapours swirling around me like amorphorous serpents. I savor that great equilizer – death. I taste every hemisphere of its delectable terror with equanimity as I make out the dials before me. She going down fast….at 1,000 feet with every three full rotations of the altimeter. My airspeed is dead zero. I am in a death spin. My minds eye turns to darkened scene many years ago that once played out in the plains of Africa where angels fear to thread. There I was standing on a promontary of a hill looking afar at distant fires at night. The sound of distant artillery puncturing the aching silence as it grew louder which each salvo. A thin line of Matabili tribesmen rose from the reeds armed with antique 303,s watching the approach of the scrouge. My wryly thin bodyguard. A man of forty handed me the shelled cup of Datura. A powerful mind altering hallugenic potion. He gestures, drink. I take a swig and soon I begin my transformation into the creature known as death. That was all I can remember of that night crushed by time..with these thoughts I eased myself further into the seat of the doomed jet like a man trying to find a comfortable spot to bear witness to my own fiery demise.

There’s no magic dwarf this time…I am going down for real this time.