Remembering the Crash, an Ancient Disaster

Dreaming the Old History

I was asleep, not even dreaming. I know it was just before three a.m. because I looked at the clock
when this was over. It was in the Spring of the year, probably in 1974. I remember that much because
it was an important event, the first one of its kind. Most things that have happened have been subtle
ones, events that I might disregard did they not correspond with other memories. This was one of
several which were not subtle and could not be mistaken for anything unimportant. This was a
message coming through, loud and clear.

It began quietly, a sense of gray clouds surrounding me as I traveled forward, a disembodied point of
consciousness. As a hole opens in the fog, I see in the far distance a single figure, a person in an odd
uniform standing in what appear to be his personal quarters aboard a great ship. The uniform is off
white, and there are black insignia on the lapels of the uniform coat. He strikes me as a junior officer.
My consciousness nears the man as he stands in front of his wardrobe straightening the details of his
uniform, and I smoothly become him, thinking as he is thinking that it is time for his watch and in a
few moments he will report to the bridge.

Everything goes instantly to chaos, tumbling, churning, and then silent darkness.

I wake up half conscious, lying on my back in my stateroom, not knowing what has happened or even
where I am. There is half light in the room, low power from the emergency system. My head rolls and
I try to focus my thoughts. I hear strange sounds, rendings and boomings that resound through the
corridors, noises that are out of place with the smooth humming background sounds of the vessel.

A rushing sound approaches me but my mind makes no sense of it until the wave of ice cold water
smashes over me in mid breath and my eyes open, wide and completely awake, as the surface recedes
quickly towards the ceiling of my room. Panicked, I struggle towards the air, but the heavy wardrobe
has fallen on top of me and I'm pinned from just below my ribs downward. Even the water won't float
it--the room has collapsed around me.

I have a double awareness, of who I was then and of who I am now. I know that the water is an alien
force, a sign that things have gone horribly wrong, that this ship was never designed to be in the
water, and that unless I can get free I have only seconds to live; and I know that I'm in bed, and I must
be dreaming, and at any second I'll wake up and think of all this as silly. I don't wake up.

I have several seconds to ponder my situation and consider my life, to wonder how I wound up in this
strange place, dying a death from thousands of years ago. I wonder what my family will think when
someone finds my body, drowned in my bed on dry land. I struggle desperately to find suitable
thoughts, grand thoughts to end my life, but it is only an animal struggle to breathe the air I don't
have. The last of my breath goes out in a convulsion of bubbles, and the cold water comes into its place
with an implosion of pain.

Then inexplicably I'm awake, sitting upright in bed in the darkness of my bedroom in Seattle, amazed
that I'm still alive and sucking in the oxygen as though I really had been on my last breath. I think, it
was only a dream, calm down, you'll have forgotten it by morning.

Morning came and the memory was still crystalline; I've never forgotten. My own memories don't
yield much beyond that. From somewhere comes the knowledge that we crashed into a shallow sea in
what we now call the Middle East. For a long time I thought that this old memory was the strangest
event of my life. The strangest things were still years away.