Greg's Blurty

There Should Have Been Mountains
I just had one of the strangest dreams I've ever had. It's also one of the most interesting, though nothing really fantastic happened. Unless you consider the U.S. being at war with Japan and Canada as being fantastic.

And wildly altered geography. I was in western Montana and a significant part of the border was formed by a river. I know that a lot of rivers cross the border out there but this was a very long stretch of the border that was formed by a river. Just like back East.

And no mountains. There should be mountains out there but there were none. And then there was the war itself. It was like no one was really all that concerned about it. At least not in the U.S. That may be because it never seemed to work itself south of the border.

The U.S. army was making it's way from East to West, slowly, with a lot of back and forth gains and losses, much like how most of the Korean War went. But the fighting stayed in Canada and it seemed like that kept a lid on the hostilities. That it would have been much worse if it ventured into America.

I have no idea how or why I was in Montana but when I found out about the war, I volunteered to go on a raid. We crossed the border at night in a small boat and blew up a small railroad bridge and everything went well right up until that point.

It was right after we blew up the bridge that we were surprised by the Japanese army. I don't know where the Canadian army was but it was clear that they were allied with the Japanese. Anyway, we were nearly captured and then chased all over the place.

We escaped by stealing cars and then making it back to the river and stealing a boat and getting back to the U.S. side. The Japanese stopped firing and pursuing the moment we reached U.S. waters. It was like they had not only learned but had adopted as gospel the "We have awakened a sleeping giant," lesson they learned at Pearl Harbor.

The next day, the American army retook the area we had just been in and we crossed the border again, this time on foot, over a bridge and went and looked at the railroad bridge we had blown up. It was in the process of being rebuilt already and we talked to an American Colonel for a minute.

He said it was an impressive job but that we were lucky we hadn't been captured because we'd be in a POW camp in Japan by now. Then the dream just sort of faded out and when I awoke, the first thing I thought was, "Where were the mountains? There should have been mountains."

Then it occurred to me that the whole thing was not much more than an episode of Hogan's Heroes. But why was everything else so real and the geography so different? And if some things were going to be wildly different, why wasn't everything? I don't know. Dreams like this tend to make me think that the people who say that every dream is an actual journey to another dimension are onto something.

There is just one other thing about this dream that I want to get down before I forget it. There were military checkpoints all over the Canadian side, just as you would expect in any war zone but in the U.S. there were none. Not even at the border. People could cross freely all they wanted without being so much as questioned. It was the kind of America that everyone wants America to be like.

Current Mood: depressed
Current Music: Coast To Coast AM----George Noory, WOC AM1420