11/05/02
Outbound Rocket


I had a dream the other night that I hadn't the time to post. I didn't remember it well even after waking up, but it left me sad when I did so. Who knows why certain dreams leave you so sad? They're not real or anything.

In it, I'm supposing the world was coming to an end or something, as people were getting ready to get on a rocket to go to a new world, to start afresh. Only certain parties could board this rocket--they had to be the most perfect examples of their race. The way it was in the dream was they were the "newest versions" or some such...do you see how you can operate an old browser like Internet Explorer 4 or some such, or you can upgrade to IE6? In the dream, only the "newest upgrades" were allowed on the rocket to leave the planet. Everyone else was imperfect, outdated, and had to be left behind.

I both participated in several roles in the dream, and just observed. It was as if I (or whoever I was) stood near my front porch door to watch the line of acceptable people and animals (animals also--they seemed sentient) board the rocket. It was a big old-fashioned rocket like the ones the old space program used. I remember a person and a poodle getting on. One of them was found to be not the newest version, and they had to be left behind with a regretful look, while another one took their place. They didn't fight it, but stood outside and watched sadly as the other boarded the rocket...they were all dressed in white...and then the rocket took off, while the rest of us, myself included, were left behind. I was sad...but I never once fought or protested my fate. I knew this was the way it was; I was not the newest version of my kind, so I would not be a part of this strange but hopeful new world.

I resigned myself to this fact. I never actually saw the rocket take off, but I determined to follow its course, something much like what I do whenever my parents leave for work. I go to the windows and watch until their vehicles are out of sight. I did this with the rocket. It left my sight for a moment, but I walked around outside the house and eventually spotted it coursing through the air, and walked slowly along to watch it vanish. It flew oddly, low, parallel to the horizon in different directions for a time before leaving my sight. And that was the end. It was gone. I continued walking around, slowly...it appeared to be spring or else late autumn, sunny out, but brown and dry and bare...and I decided to go walking toward the side road, the last direction I'd seen the rocket go in. Just because.

I got to the road at the end of my driveway and looked east, in the direction of the dead-end road. It had grown darker now, so I could see light down there. I frowned and looked closer. It wasn't light...it was fire. Fire. Terror and anxiety rushed up inside me. There was fire blazing down there, and it didn't look like a controlled blaze. Oh, no. It COULDN'T be what I feared it was! I went out into the road and started jogging, then running to make sure it wasn't. It COULDN'T be.

There were people living down here, like in real life, a few walking around in their yards. It appeared to be evening now and there were scattered fires all over in the trees and grass, and bits of debris scattered upon the ground and in the branches. I couldn't make out anything specific, but my fear wouldn't go away. "What happened?" I demanded of one of the people walking around. They seemed resigned also, not really saddened, but resigned. It was nobody's job to protest anything in this dream.

Somebody said what I'd prayed they wouldn't say. "It was the rocket..."

I broke down and started sobbing in disbelief. The rocket. The one hope for a new world, a new life for our people and our kind...and it had crashed, practically upon takeoff. From the looks of it, everyone aboard was dead. All the perfect people, the newest versions, those found suitable enough to start anew. In one blow they were all gone, and with them, our hope. It wasn't so much that that bothered me, as the fact that THEY WERE GONE. THEY, as people, living beings, were gone. I'd held much hope for them, and instead this irony had happened. The very thing that had been intended to save them, and to save us, had killed them instead.

There was more to the dream that I can't quite recall...but it was other parts, unrelated. Something about walking around in a big auditorium-like building with a friend I had not seen in ages; that's all I can vaguely remember right now. The rocket dream left me with the feeling you get that something bad is going to happen, but as if you can ever tell exactly what? I believe most dreams are not meant to be taken literally. Still, when I've dreamed of disasters in the past, it always made me nervous, for whatever reasons.



2002 Dreams
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