A sunny day as always, though the sky is black, as always. You get used to it. I'm driving on a rough winding road: clay or hard dirt. It, and others in the distance, are raised like levees. But a flood's unlikely: this is the moon.

So I'm dreaming! I go lucid. Why do I need a car, if it's a dream? Park it in the middle of this lunar rill and get out. Leap high in the air, and look around while I float down. If I am descending at all. No. I'm levitating! Well, why not? I'm lucid; I can do what I want.

A speck far off. Someone's watching me. An aluminum glint. A cyborg! This person also hops a little in the air (well, nearly vacuum--the terraforming program hasn't made much headway yet). Whoever it is can fly like me; up and away, over the black horizon.

BOOM! A tremendous shockwave behind us. A nuclear explosion! I tumble mid-air, or vacuum, and when I right myself I fly on, zigzagging. I have a feeling anywhere I pause is going to burn. Someone's out to get me. Lobbing nukes from lunar orbit!

The shockwave knocked me so far up and so fast I may well be in low orbit myself. The gray globe pivots under me. No, not gray; faintly ochre, golden-brown craters and mountains. Desert, but beautiful. Not a silver eye in the sky, a world. Perspective is all.

A gigantic bulls' eye swings under me, staring out blind--Mare Orientalis, I think. 1000 km across, the biggest scar on the moon. Now it seems to be more like a map, on which the cartographers are just starting to piece together the arcs and see the scale of the old catastrophe. I think they're still underestimating it a bit.

I land at last, far from the nuclear bombsite. Still unsure if there's air. I breathe a little to check. I'm still lucid, so I experiment with CREATING air by the act of breathing it...

Now what?

On the run, on my own... but lucid, on the moon.

NOTE IN THE MORNING

Mare Orientalis: the biggest impact scar on Luna, and visible from Earth but unnoticed until the fly-by missions! It was on the edge, so distorted and foreshortened we failed to appreciate its scale. Saw it but didn't see it. In the dream, I think Mare Orientalis means the huge scar of an ancient trauma I haven't yet fully recognized--though I have the facts and could deduce it, they're just pieces to me so far. But what? I don't know.

TWENTY YEARS LATER

Now do I know. When I was two or three, my crazy uncle lived with us and (unknown to my parents) told me in detail what his shock treatments were like. I figured if I acted too strange, my parents would turn me in too, and burn my brain. As an adult I had constant nightmares of mental institutions and fears of cops and psychiatrists; but I didn't learn the facts behind the fears until a few years ago.

But there's a second source for the imagery, which I also couldn't have identified in 1980. Eighteen years later, I read Philip K Dick's novel SOLAR LOTTERY. There's a bizarre chase scene on Luna that my dream echoes quite vividly. Having caught many dream-references to events, films and books in my near future, I recognize the pattern, but this is one of the longest-term predictive/anticopatory dreams I've ever found--just as Mare Orientalis is on a scale of its own. Why such a strong reaction to the book? Well, I identified a lot with the hero, a working-class rebel in a world of smug professionals who had the system nicely rigged. Dick predicted (along with other unpleasant social phenomena) the yuppie.

Create your own air, people. The well-off aren't going to give you any.

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