Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream

The title is not only the opening line of a fine Traffic rock ‘n’ roll song from the 1970s, it’s also what happened to us the last two nights.

On the first night, we dreamed that we owned two Ocean 71 ketches — we sold our Ocean 71 Big O 20 years ago — and a smaller Olson 30-ish kind of boat. For one reason or the other, all three took off on an around-the-Farallones race without us on any of them. How we got left behind is unclear, because we were supposed to drive one of them. Anyway, it was a very rough race, and by the next morning 11 of the 70 entries hadn’t finished or even been heard from. That included all three of our boats. Naturally we were very concerned.

The dream seemed to go on forever. It was so powerful that when we woke up, it took a couple of minutes to convince ourselves that we didn’t own any of the boats.

The other dream is one that we’ve had twice recently. Somehow or the other we’d inherited an old house with a garage not far from some body of water. When we finally got around to looking into the garage, we found a rather large marine engine coming halfway up through the floor. When we looked down around the engine, we could see that there was actually the entire hull of an older Navy vessel beneath the garage, and that the floor of the garage was actually one of the decks of the ship. Once again it was a strong and vivid dream, and we had it twice in one week.

Calling Dr. Freud.

Have you ever had any marine-orientated dreams/nightmares? If you want to share one, be brief.