In which three kinds of strong beer get me in trouble with the law, but allow me to fly.
I was doing something high up, in a helicopter or perhaps a balloon, quiet and unobtrusive: I happened to drop things, very small things like toothpicks at first, but from that height they made a difference to people below. Then they became bigger: a small tool, something the size of a paperback book, and this was enough to kill or maim. My work up in the air must have been important, as I became distressingly aware of the effect it was having below. Finally I came down, having killed several people, and in great upset began to explain the reasons.
When the police came to get me, four or six burly, grim officers stepping out of the crowd and surrounding me, they got hold me of me in whatever I was in -- the gondola of the airship perhaps; and I explained that it wasn't the complex machine that did it, but the simple cardboard box I was sitting in. And so I demonstrated that using just this box I could fly away, away, up into the sky and out of their clutches.
Next dream. Into sight came a gigantic papyrus boat, then another behind it: it was all gleaming yellowish-white, no burnished thrones or purple sails. We were by some wall in the water, and someone told us what was going on, or perhaps one of us realized it. It was the set of a film like Kon-Tiki, only this was the Pharaoh's aircraft carrier and battleship.
I told Eric this was the most magnificent thing I'd seen, equalled only by the time I'd been on the Thames surrounded by great wooden ships, and I'd been in this tiny wooden rowboat paddling myself around among them. It was the most stable, responsive form of transport ever, endless fun, the ideal transport. By now we were in some kind of market garden on the shore, and I demonstrated that you could just fly in it, and did so.
Adjunct to this dream or the next. A stadium, or a bank, a rough tall earthen bank that people might sit on, leading down to a river rather than a stadium ground. It wasn't easy to find seats: partly rough, partly icy and frosty, and mainly full of people. I found a seat on the left edge, but there were worrying discolorations in the rime. Liz pointed them out too. Perhaps they had been deliberately made using coloured water, but there was also the possibility that they were fron slops or unwanted proceeds of the previous large crowd. That was when I noticed it was Liz that Eric had been with. I had greeted her as quite normal to see her, and as if we'd already met once recently; but has the previous time (on the river and in the market garden?) been her or N.? He explained she was now a researcher at Latrobe and they'd thought why not.
Third dream. I was in a shop, bookshop perhaps, or department store, crawling round in some interesting section. Incidentally I had found a few small things. Possibly small enough that I had shoplifted them: no larger than a book of matches, a condom, a little tube of sweets.
Then -- or perhaps before this -- I was in a bathroom, coming out drying myself, letting the towel fall. There was a beautiful woman of the model type, surprised by my being there, but I deliberately ignored her and began drying out naked. She undressed and prepared to go in. I grabbed her and, though she was shocked at first, she soon responded to my groping, and I began trying to complete it... singularly frustrating that I couldn't quite manage.
Crawling round back in the shop I discarded a couple of the little things in a bin, and was intending to make my way out, crawling across carpeted bumps in the map department, when a nasty old security guard ordered me to come along with him. I explained that what he saw me slipping into my mouth was just one of the sweets from the packet, but he wasn't interested, and just kept walking.
As we went along the long route outside to his office, which we never got to, it being in one of those interminable hangar/university buildings that haunt my dreams, he said he'd checked up on me, and found I was the one who had shot a bullet through one of the plate-glass windows we were passing. I protested and said that was years ago... Then realized I was making myself look bad by changing my story, but it hadn't been me at all. The police had charged me with throwing a stone, but the hole in the window had quite obviously been made by a bullet, and no-one at the trial had suggested I had shot anything. I could show him... but the window had been replaced in the intervening years.
Finally after yet another turn in the high-up corridors I decided I wasn't going along with him any more, he had no right etc.; and though I didn't have my cardboard box with me here I could still just float away out of his grasp.