The Help Dream
Sunshine streamed in through large windows. I was younger and installing something involving wires in my home’s living room when I asked my wife for help. I needed to go back into a small space and I wanted her to hand the wires through to me. She asked me if I could do it by myself. I countered, I could, but she was there, and that made it easier.
She said, “How would you do it if I wasn’t here?”
I replied, “I have a ball of twine. I’d tie the wires’ ends to the string, and then tape it so it wouldn’t pull loose, and then just pull it through.”
Turning away, she answered, “Then why don’t you do that? Just do it yourself.”
The Magic Models Dream
The dream began with me in a small town with two friends, a male and female. We were all youngish, I’d guess in our twenties. An attack by Russian aircraft on another place in the world was underway. I had three models of the aircraft involved in my hands. These models were about a foot long but made of plastic. Somehow, using magic and the models, we were able to down the five jets. We knew this by watching it in a shallow puddle of water. Although the three of us were involved, the other two credited me with doing it.
Afterward, as we walked around the small town, with its parks and wide, quiet streets, news of what we’d done spread. People kept showing up out of nowhere asking for details and then asking if we could do it again. I was certain that we could. My female friend arrived with a video camera and told me that she wanted to interview me. Then she would broadcast it and put it on the net. I agreed to that, and was ready with the models, but small matters kept delaying us from beginning the interview.
She said that we would do it later and walked off after I agreed. I walked around more with the models and came to a fast moving, swollen creek. While watching the water rising up over rocks and crashing down, I grew aware that I could see other scenes happening in it. They mesmerized me. Leaning in to see things more clearly, I lost one of the models in the water. After some frantic searching for it, I spotted it floating down the creek and rushed after it.
With a little effort, I captured the model as it passed under a bridge. I realized then that it was time for me to meet my friend for the interview. As I arrived there, people approached me and told me that news crews from CBS and NBC were there to interview me. Someone else told me someone wanted to have me on their television show but I couldn’t understand the television show.
I saw my friend set up with the camera by a pavilion under a wide oak tree. I told everyone that I had to do my interview with her first and then walked in her direction.
Dream end.
More DIY Success
Another little victory in the DIY repair realm.
In a previous post, I mentioned that my Black & Decker BH3000 string trimmer had died. A plug-in electrical tool, it went without a whimper. No sparks and few complaints. Intermittently, it wouldn’t begin when I held in the trigger but then operated after tapping it against the ground or jiggling it hard. This time, no jiggling, thumping, tapping, whacking, or swearing brought it back to life.
To the net! I put in the results. Naturally, unrelated things with my search were the first pieces of information provided. Going down past them, I found a link that looked promising.
It was. I watched part of the video three times and then went to work. Twenty minutes later, success.
Yes, it’s a small thing. The device is prolly five years old and cost sixty dollars when I bought it. But I really didn’t want to buy a new one, as that would mean getting rid of the old one. And not having to do the wasteful consumer shuffle is the real victory.
A Messy Dream
Although, it was in a military setting, I thought the messy theme provided the important aspect.
Young again, I was with a bunch of other military in a battlestaff room. Large and horse-shoe shaped, it had multiple phones, display panels, maps, flags, all that sort of thing. Unlike standard battlestaff areas, this one had large windows, too, showing that we were in the middle of the night.
I knew all the military there. We weren’t working, but just hanging around together. It seemed like a large party with elements of a sleepover. I had an impression that was never clarified that we were waiting for something. Plates, food, sleeping bags, and pillows cluttered the place, offending my sense of order.
Knots of conversation were going on. Laughter abounded, and pizza and vegetable trays were set up. Almost all the others were officers. They teased me about being serious. I walked around, eating food, looking for things to do, feeling isolated. Some were gathered around an older style television, large and square, full of tubes. They were watching red and black action and trying to figure out what it was. I joined them and realized they were watching the ‘TNT’ cable network, and then said, “This is a NASCAR race.” Bizarrely, the screen was almost all black; the cars were outlined in bright red.
I went on from that, shaking my head, and then decided to leave to get clothes. I hastened to my place. Getting there just required going down corridors and around corners. Reaching there, I found my wife all dressed up to go out. She said she wanted to go back with me. I said, “Why not?”
When we returned, I did a general introduction of my wife. I sat and she sat on my lap, flirting with me and kissing me. I enjoyed this but then she said she was going back to our place. That was fine. Whatever was going on seemed to be drawing down as about half of the gathered personnel trickled out. Walking around, I discovered phone lines blinking. I asked, “Why isn’t anyone answering any of these phones?”
One of the others replied, “We didn’t want to.”
Annoyed, I began answering phones. Nobody was on usually. Walking around, I discovered that they’d taken the hotlines off their cradles. Back in the decades I was in the military, these phones were red, black, and yellow. All were set off by themselves and were dedicated to specific purposes — one was the red phone which hooked up to headquarters and national command authorities. The black one was for the secondary crash net, for when a major accident was happening, used to pass information to many agencies at once. Beside it was a dark green one, used to connect with the Central Security Center. Another, which was green, was the AUTOVON system, a sort of military long-distance calling network.
All these phones were off their cradles, horrifying me. As I chastised the others, they laughed off my concerns. I also discovered that the UHF & VHF radios were turned off.
Oh, my God, I couldn’t believe it. They’d basically ignored all calls or disabled all communication systems. As I did, I found muddy foot prints all over the floors.
I went about fixing it all. Hard rain began pelting the windows. I looked around and discovered the others were gone, leaving only a mess.
Dream end.
Michael Seidel, writer 