Great topic.
I have a reoccurring dream, every few months, that really disturbs me. I am always at my Mum's place across town visiting, and I suddenly realise that there's a lot of aeroplanes milling overhead (which in real life does happen a bit as there are lots of light trainers and topdressers that pass over her place, flying from Hamilton Airport).
But I realise that they are warbirds, often there is up to 15 or 20 of them slowly circling above me, and it seems that this is the holding point for an airshow happening at Hamilton Airport about 15km away.
I watch for ages just staring at the planes - which seem to change each time i have this dream and have included loads of Fokker Triplanes and other WWI stuff, through to Mustangs and Spitfires up to - wierdly - even a B-17. Anyway the wonderful spectacle is always vivid and thrilling but always a bit different. Sometimes I am standing on Mum's front lawn, sometimes out the back. Sometimes I'm alone and other times i am with people, even my Dad who died 6 years ago.
Then suddenly, every time, there's a mid-air collision which i ussually see happen and a couple of the planes come down into either the neighbourhood over the back of Mum's place or into the paddock over the road. There's always fire and an explosion, it is always terrifying. On one occasion I recall the plane that crashed was actually a 747 (something we never see around these parts! As rare here as the B-17!), and it crashed into the racecourse that is a block from Mum's place.
There's always a panic, sometimes parachutes are drifting down, and I usually wake up with my heart racing and feeling really upset. It's so odd to me, because it would never happen in real life. If there was an airshow at Hamilton, I would be there!! Not at Mum's place. And some of the planes just don't get seen in NZ or around here. One of these dreams was not a mix of planes but instead was a jet display team with all the same aircraft in formation, and I think may have been the Red Arrows. Most of them came down in the crash.
I have thankfully never witnessed a real crash nor anything more than a gentle groundloop so it's not a memory triggering this. It's a bit wierd. _______ I also have this other recurring aviation related dream. 20 years ago I was in the Royal New Zealand Air Force. I got out in 1993. In recent years I have dreamed several times that I have rejoined, it is my first day back and I am on a new RNZAF Base that I've never seen before, but i know it;s a long way from home, and I'm trying to find my bearings and trying to make out I know what I'm doing.
Everyone around me is young and very good at what they do and as the dream progresses I get more and more lost and scared and keep breaking rules by accident and getting into trouble, and everyone around starts to realise how dumb and out of touch I really am. I end up quite panicked, sometimes the others actually rebel against me and I get chased around the base. Sometimes I have had a good day but I'm trying to find my barrack room in a maze of blocks and am totally lost. Sometimes I am trying to just get some food in the Mess and when I finally get to the front of the queue there's nothing left (something that did happen a few times for real when I was in the RNZAF!! haha).
I always end up regretting the fact I rejoined and just wanting to get the hell out of there and so i am trying to find a way to escape. Then I wake up. I always find it quite funny, especially as a few years back I did look into rejoining. The reality of things is though that the real RNZAF is now a mere shadow of its former self whereas the Air Force I rejoin in the dream is a massive and complex one.
-------- Lastly I had a great, wonderful one off dream recently about a secret restoration hangar at the Air Force Museum of New Zealand at Wigram, Christchurch. it amused me so much i actually wrote about it on my WONZ Forum. This is what I wrote:
"Last night I had a really vivid dream that I was taken into a large hangar at Wigram, which was a seperate area of restoration that the public don't normall see.
Within this hangar were three Avenger fuselages lined up side by side in WWII paint, faded but not too tatty. One of them had Seven Dwarf characters painted on it in various places - each side of the cowl and also each side of the fuselage near the tail. Snow White was near the canopy on the port side. The other two fuselages didn't have nose art.
Also in there was a reasonably tatty Mosquito fuselage with the wood showing, a P-40 in dark green Pacific camouflage, and there was the remains of some big aircraft that I think was a Sunderland hull, that at some stage had been used by the museum as an art gallery inside as I could see the paintings in there and the guide said it was from ages back and they were to restore it.
There were loads of old men, WWII veteran volunteers, in white overalls working away on everything and lots of them told me about the various things I came across. One told me the Avengers had recently been found in a shed in their wartime paint and they were planning to put them back together and display them all as is with the artwork on the Seven Dwarf one taking centre stage.
The dream was so vivid I could see, feel, and smell these old aeroplanes. And the sounds of the engineering was all there. I was so stoked to be wandering round in there. I was about to get my camera out when my alarm in real life went off, and woke me up. darn!!"
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