THAT DAY

I read True Stories and Other Essays by Francis Spufford, the guy who wrote Cahokia Jazz. Formidable. I feel chastened in the presence of a grownup. Though he lives in a world I never will--a Christian with all the confidence of that long tradition behind him. While I struggle even to see my world without distortion through his people's language and concepts.

Most troubling: his essay on British innovation says the government strangled their aerospace and auto industries. Brilliant inventors and superb craftsmen won the Grand Prix year after year, but mass-producing their winning innovations lagged until Britain couldn't compete with the Continent, let alone America and China. Policy starved whole sectors of Britain. And starves them still. The ruling class profits from financial games in London, not industry in the towns and prosperity in the cottages.

THAT NIGHT

I'm a girl in Lone Mountain College, a Catholic school in San Francisco. I live on campus, in a huge stone dorm a century old. I'm way up on the seventh floor, above the street noise--or so I thought.

But one night I dream (inside the dream!) that my elevator stops at the fifth floor and won't go on. I get out and explore, feeling uneasy.

With reason. The southwest corner window is smashed, and even the stone sill's cracked--something hit the wall hard. Warily peer out through the wound. A delta-winged monster sprawls dead in the street. A Concorde, the supersonic jetliner from that shining future that never was. Just too damn noisy, demanded too much fuel...

And too long a runway. That caused this failure. The airport's gotten so crowded, the City recently offered the little-used eastern mile or two of this street as a spillover runway. Not our stretch by the college, of course--too busy. But this awkward giant didn't lift off in time! The passenger section survived, but the wingtips and tailfins and that long nose are all smashed in...

THAT MORNING

I wake up in my dorm room. Get up... and go see if it's true. Slip on a blue & white dress and pad barefoot down to the fifth floor. The southwest corner's smashed up. Not vandals; the glass fell inward. Gingerly pick through it to the sill...

The street's a mess. A jet taxied west up our steep street, using it as a runway-ramp, but couldn't lift off. A fin or wingtip hit our dorm, and its tail caught a couple of cars and dragged them along, and one of them hit a third, hard, and... now burnt-out cars and a battered jet now fill the street.

The that long anteater-nose, though crumpled now, makes the model unmistakable. A Concorde.

A friend asks me--"Did the crash affect your dreams? Even through stone, you must have heard the noise."

I tell my dream-within-a-dream, wondering how, in the dream, I knew. All I could have heard was a loud crash--but how'd I know it was a Concorde?

THAT MORNING, AGAIN

I wake again--male this time, across town in my home, not a student in a Lone Mountain dorm. The waking proof that my dream was predictive... was itself a dream.

NOTES

• Religious college in SF: Francis Spufford's essays on being Christian during late capitalism--relevant to anyone with working morals.
• The Concorde: Spufford said the ruling class strangled the British auto and aerospace industries. Finance was more lucrative. For them.
• Female: genderbent dreams often mean "Pay attention, this issue's important." Though not always about gender.
• Blue and white dress: Dorothy Gale, in Oz! Good witches wear white and Munchkins wear blue, so they thought her blue & white dress was a political statement! The dream is subtly prompting me to face I'm a witch, whose dreams are frequently predictive. (Yes, I'm saying the dream is aware of its own type, and is nudging the dimwit conscious to interpret it as paranormal but positive.)
• A dream figure prompts me to note my dream-within-a-dream was predictive: a stronger prompt to read the dream as predictive.
• Cars ricochet on my street: in 2023, a City worker caused just such a crash--totaling my parked car. The City Attorney's office refused to compensate me all through 2024. My "caseworker" was actually hostile counsel, using every cheat in the late-capitalist playbook--yet was taxpayer-funded, not a corporate attack dog. Left me feeling American government and business are equally corrupt.

ACTION

Prepare for hard times. America won't heal soon from Trump enacting the billionaires' agenda--climate denial, fossil fuels, deregulation. The British elite had similar policies, and led to generations of poverty. Trump's dream (discord, not Concorde) won't fly either--but will leave an equally long wake of ruin.

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