On a weekday morning in 1969 I awoke from an ugly dream about a black revolver being fired; gray looking hairy pigs and a gray choking mist.
The dream left a bad taste in my mouth as though I had sipped something deadly.
I knew the dream involved a friend of mine; a Vietnam War veteran who had been a Marine. A large man with long red hair and unkempt beard who used to sit on the steps of one of the student centers across the Boulevard from the Student Union.
I liked him a lot because he was warm, friendly and just likable. Bear like. I don’t know if he was a student or not, but he was the right age to be one.
He was like so many others that came back from Vietnam with scars that couldn’t be seen on his body, so he had a residual anger against the "Establishment" as it was called back then.
I had a bad feeling about him, and I had just had a nightmare. But I wasn’t accustomed to trusting my dreams.
I was in college at the time, and when I arrived at the Student Union I didn’t see him where he usually sat, so I tried to find out how he was and learned the grim truth. He had been shot by the police, people that he literally considered pigs.
And I dreamed about it when it happened early that morning.
About that time, I remembered a dream that I had where I had managed to remove myself from my body and float out the window next to the bed. I remember feeling the sieve like character of the screen as I was passing through it.
I was turned on my left side and I had pulled myself out of my back. I was a kind of clear gelatinous balloon.
Not something I normally think of as me.
Is my friend just a clear gelatinous something now?
Aerie Dreams
