The Glass Cockpit

I will likely cross-post this to my personal blog (still pretty much empty) but post it here because I've been putting off contributing here 'til the morrow... and we all know tomorrow never comes!

I had a bizarre dream on Tuesday night... the third of a series of strange dreams. But this one seemed the easiest to interpret, to me. I was a passenger on a plane, and I was interrupted from my magazine reading by the pilot, who came out and sat in the back-facing flight attendant's seat. He started bantering with the passengers, and everyone was laughing. Except me. I looked ahead of him and suddenly could see through the cockpit to the outside world. We were coming in for a landing, but I could see that we were coming in too low to hit the runway. A very high concrete wall raced toward us.

I yelled to the pilot, "What the hell are you doing joking with the passengers? Who's landing the plane??"

And with that, we crashed into the wall. I awoke upon impact.


This dream seemed to say a lot about life, to me. Imagining the plane as the vehicle of one's life, I see so many people content to be a passenger, occassionally looking out the little window next to them, with no idea of where the plane is heading. Can't say that I blame them... those darned cockpits so often appear solid, opaque, and locked. But the few who can attain a glass cockpit to see where they're going... circumstance and luck still play a role, but at least they can see the dangers (and opportunities) before they've passed by.

Or even better, those even fewer who manage to get inside the cockpit and start flying the plane... "oh, the places you'll go!" At that point, one becomes responsible for the itinerary, the pitstops, every destination decided...

This post brought to you in E-Choice (coined by Bob in Trajectories). Dreams and personal narratives just don't seem to flow as well without "is"es.