Dreaming Over Australia

May 22, 1995

Bang! I've just jerked awake from a vivid dream on the overnight flight from Singapore to Sydney -- the last, long run in a marathon series of flights from Munich to Frankfurt to Bangkok to Singapore to Sydney, where I'll clear customs, find some coffee to get the blood circulating again, and then catch the final hop to Brisbane. My watch says that it's 2:30 AM, but I can't remember if that's Singapore-time or Sydney-time, a distinction that seems utterly irrelevant at this point. I stare out the window of the plane, 33,000 feet above the pitch-black, mysterious desert of north-central Australia that stretches endlessly in all directions, trying to remember what the dream was all about.

I think Alice Springs is another couple hundred miles further south, and I vaguely recall the pilot's announcement over the loud-speaker last night that we're scheduled to cross above it enroute to Sydney -- but I don't really know where we are at this point. There's just an occasional single light pricking the darkness on the ground, then an orange glow signalling a lonely fire of some kind... Who knows how big it really is down there, I mutter to myself ... It couldn't possibly be the campfire of an aboriginal, yet it couldn't be a raging forest-fire, either -- maybe a few kangaroos have set a clump of sagebrush on fire and are roasting marshmallows while singing "Waltzing Matilda" in loud, raucous voices. ... my mind is wandering, and I can't really tell if I'm awake or still trapped by the sounds and sight and smells of the dream I've been having.

There's a naked half-moon filling part of the empty sky above me with a cold light, but as the 747 banks slightly and shifts its course, I can see some bright stars low on the horizon. Big Dipper? Southern Cross? Who knows? Four of the tiny beads of light form a cross, like a "T", and they're low enough and bright enough that they look like tiny white "Tic-Tac" candies that I could pluck from the sky and pop into my mouth ...

Everyone else in the airplane cabin is sound asleep, and the lights are out; we won't land for another three hours, and the flight attendants are probably sleeping, too, having stuffed everyone with food and drink after we left Singapore last night. My Sony Walkman has slipped out of my seat, down onto the floor, but I can retrieve it by gently pulling up on the earphone cord, like reeling in a small, fat fish. Once back in my hands, I grope for the "play" button, and start the third repetition of Michael Jones' new-age piano piece, Morning in Medonte. The liner notes for the tape, which I've long since lost, insist that there is no such place, and it seems appropriate to carry with me on these eternal flights, when for days on end, I seem to be no place at all, suspended in an artificial world above the planet. It's become a ritual to begin playing the first movement of the piece as the pilot revvs up his engines at the end of the runway, and bolts forward on the departure of whatever trip I'm taking; I then usually drift off, sound asleep by the end of the first side of the tape, sometimes dreaming in synchronized harmony to the melody of the piano ...

... This dream, now that bits and pieces of it come back to me, was a weird one, indeed. I was in some kind of a mobile-home trailer, having fallen asleep in the midst of chaos and clutter, clothes and junk all over the place. What awoke me was the arrival of my three children, all of whom were more fully grown than now, and who burst into the trailer ... the two older kids were now adults, but in the prime of their 20s. And my youngest, who is 15 in actuality, was about 18 or 19, tall and slender -- so handsome it would break your heart. Which he had apparently done: he was telling everyone how he had been picked up by a 57-year old (female) journalist, someone who apparently looked like Lauren Bacall, who was trying to seduce him. "Why should I waste it on her?" he kept asking in a bemused tone ...

There were lots of other sub-plots in all of this, and other players hovering in the background, but now I can't remember any more of it. Who were the small children who had come into the trailer earlier and made the mess -- scattering clothes and toys and half-eaten food all over the place -- that I had been trying to clean up? What was so exhausting about it that I had fallen asleep, half on the sofa-bed, and half-off? (Aha, that's easy: my dream was recapturing the experience of trying to sleep on this damned airplane seat.) What on earth was I doing in the trailer in the first place? Where was my wife? Was she sleeping next to me, or had she (as I think I recall one of the children relating to another, within the dream) gone off somewhere on Manhattan's Upper West Side to find a new apartment for us, to replace our trailer? Whatever was going on, I certainly wasn't in charge -- I was simply a dazed observer, watching three fully grown children-become-adults, dancing a synchronized rhythm I no longer understood.

And now I remember what woke me: seeing the three children, so vibrant and happy and tuned into each other's emotions, evoked an overpowering sense of joy and gratitude that I was their father. Perhaps because my unconscious brain knew that it was floating somewhere over the empty deserts of Australia, rather than the streets of Manhattan, the emotion that awoke me said loudly but silently ...

It's time to go home.