(IJN Akagi maneuvering, 1941)

Sorry, this is late and I am still processing The Dream. I ought to be getting my butt in gear and doing something productive.

I am not much for interpretation of these night-time things, and normally do not recall much about the dreams I am sure I have all the time. The ones I recall are the ones that wake you with heart pounding Technicolor aspects that stay with me for a while. You know, the ones with doom that builds into some Zombie Apocalypse with a lot of running and the certainty that it will not end well.

I don’t think I die in those, though I am sure when ZA comes around I will.

This was something different. I have some pals who understand spirit journeys and shamanism, and I am sympathetic to sincere beliefs. After the way Raven and Big Mama took their leave, I have decided not to rule anything out.

So, skeptic that I am, I do not know what to make of this dream. I have been having a weird sleep cycle and there has been a lot on my mind to process during REM sleep- relationships and retirement and money.

So, I was having a particularly realistic journey across the dreamscape as the alarm clock was heading toward 0230. It was quite striking. It had no zombies, no running, or falling. No nightmarish aspects at all, in fact. It was just a matter-of-fact adventure in national security and time travel.

I was talking to some of the people I used to work with, lining out The Mission, which involved an insertion into another time and space. The fabric of some of the places we worked- bunkers, gates, concrete motif- was both dramatic and completely familiar. It looked a little like the tunnel at Field Station Kunia, up in the pineapple fields near Wahiawa in central O’ahu.

(Portal to the Field Station Kunia)

Walking out of the bunker, I found myself in a seat in a prop aircraft droning through crystalline skies towards a big ship with a straight deck. I felt the play for the deck, and the cut pass, something the jets do not do in today’s aircraft carrier navy. The jets hit the deck at full power just in case a hook-skip results in a “bolter,” and the need for speed to get off the deck and take the airplane around again.

Not this one- the invisible pilot chopped the power and down we came, snagging the wire and surging forward into the straps.

I realized we had flown- presumably from a field in Hawaii- to the Kida Butai, the First Air Fleet striking arm of the Imperial Japanese Navy that was about to attack Pearl Harbor.

The feel of the carrier was familiar, even if the ship was not. Straight deck with pillars to support it, fore and aft. Akagi, I wondered? I was not exactly a prisoner, and not exactly a guest. A large and imposing Japanese officer came to the stateroom where I was being held with a female comrade, an officer who I now cannot identify (Alice, my deputy at 3rd Fleet?) as the dream ended and some of the details are fleeing with consciousness and caffeine.

But the conversation that occurred in the stateroom was vivid then and is vivid now. The imposing and somewhat rumpled officer was striking, and I had been warned of his size. He asked me why I was there, an American at this time.

(CDR Minaru Genda, First Air Fleet)

I said: “The past cannot be changed but I need to be a witness.”

He nodded, thoughtfully, as though that was the most natural thing. He asked what was going to happen the next day. I told him his forces would achieve near total surprise, and they would destroy all of the battleships in the harbor. He smiled and then said, “what will happen after that?”

I said: “You will lose your freedom, your life and your country.”

I then woke in the darkness. The time displayed on the clock on the side-table glowed that awkward time: too early to rise, too late to get back down. And the dream was so vivid, as though I had stepped into one of Mac’s stories of that time long ago.

I finally gave up and got up. I looked on the computer to see if there were any remarkably large or rumbled officers in the Kido Butai, but those are hardly decent search terms.

Admiral Yamamoto, whose English was quite good, did not fit the bill, though our pal Mac was involved in planning the ambush that killed him.

I sipped coffee and looked out the dining room window into the single-digit darkness of the start winter. So, why would the dead want to approach me?

(CAPT Charles Hamilton Maddox)

I have an interesting relationship with a woman who is on a quest to find out what happened to her grandfather, CAPT Charles Hamilton Maddox, academy grad, radio specialist, and head of the British Empire Section at the office of Naval Intelligence.

On that real morning after I talked to the dream Japanese officer on the ghost ship, CAPT Maddox was Senior Officer Present Afloat (SOPA) and directed USS Ward (DD-139) to engage the Empire of the Sun, hitting a mini-sub attempting to enter the harbor’s submarine defenses by shadowing an American supply ship.

That was hours before the wave of Kates and Vals showed up over the harbor to savage the sleeping battleships.

Her quest enabled her to travel and hire investigators and she had a remarkable number of Pearl Harbor Survivors as correspondents, Mac included. They are just about all gone now, certainly the senior officers who might shed light on what happened even at this distance. There are some holes in the story.

We talked a while ago, trying to unravel some of the many mysteries, so maybe that is why the dream percolated to the surface- but it was weird, and unlike any dream I can recall.

As usual, I felt the need to talk to Mac about it. Unfortunately, the only way I can do that is in dreamland.

Weird.

Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

Twitter: @jayare303