AOF dream and weird coloration

[fbhjr]

The Agents Of Fortune was the comic book my wife and I did 20+ years ago. We only did about 20 issues and they were only published at local comic book stores. (And, I only use the plural of store because the same guy owned 2 at the time.)
But, my wife and I had written a lot more story then we ever put out. Occasionally I still write stories from that character set, even though she is the only other person who would understand them. ( yebo might, but wouldn’t know how the characters retired, which is most of what I write about these days…)
One of the characters was an inventor type, and made a lot of money developing and selling hoverbikes. They were supposed to be cheap to the point of being disposable.
Now, on with the dream…

The dream was set about 20 years ago. I just received my new hover bike in the mail and wanted to test it out. I needed to go to visit my grandmother for some reason, so decided to use the hoverbike as it is only about 20 miles each way.

The hoverbike could take two people, so my wife was coming with me.
Despite being a hoverbike for two, it was very small, about the size of a table leg, but made of white plastic. (At most a meter long and not much wider then my hand.)
It was shaped a lot like Princess Leia’s ship in the original Star Wars movie, only it didn’t have the hammer head on the front. Instead it had two levers set into the side that could be pulled up or down from the body of it. The wide parts were where you sat on it.
My wife and I are not small people. The two of us sitting on this was an issue. There was a plastic divider that snapped between the two seating areas to separate them, but it didn’t work well.
So, with both of us on it, there was only enough left to grip with my hands.

By flipping the levers up and down, you could get the bike to hover and move forward. After some experimentation with this, I got it so we could move forward at about 20 miles and hour.
My wife doesn’t like heights. She didn’t want to fly above the trees on back roads. I didn’t want to fly lower because of the cars.
So, we flew along the highway.
Flew might be the wrong word for it. Lurched unevenly through the air as I tried to get the thing to do what I wanted as my wife held on for dear life.
As we went along the highway, there was a huge traffic jam. As we were flying, we flew up to the start of it where there was a car accident blocking all of the lanes. There were a whole lot of police and other emergency vehicles there.
I was flying very slow and close to the ground as I got close to it as I didn’t want to be in the way if a helicopter showed up.
One of the police men waved me over.
“Hey, do you have a pilot’s license for that?” he asked.
I landed it near him.
“This is classified as an ultra-light and doesn’t need a license,” I said.
“I’ve seen ultra-lights and that isn’t one,” he said.
“It’s less than 100 pounds and holds less than 1 gallon of gas,” I said.
“It doesn’t use gas,” he said.
“That has nothing to do with how ultra-lights are classified,” I said.
“Well, you shouldn’t have it on the highway,” he said. “I’m writing you up.”
I twisted the levers and we lurched off away from him as he yelled for us to stop. I was very glad it didn’t have a license plate for him to write down.

After that, my wife insisted on going along the back roads instead of the highway. This was a problem with the lurching. The first time I took off down a back road, we lurched straight up into the electric wires overhead. Like birds, we weren’t touching anything else, so didn’t get hurt. But, it did not make my wife happy.

As we got into Wellesley, where my grandmother lived, it started to fly even more erratically. I realized it must be running low on fuel. I looked for a place to land, and we were going over Wellesley College. So, I headed there. We landed in one of the buildings where there seemed to be some sort of party going on with a bunch of young men in suits. (Strange at a women’s college…) They seemed to think we were part of their group and us lurching in the window on a hoverbike a great entrance. So, while they talked about it, I looked at the bike. Up near the front of it was a rubber cover over a hole in the side.
“Use sea water only,” was stamped into the plastic under the cover. I went into the pantry off of where the party was. I found a salt shaker, emptied it into a pitcher of water and stirred it up. Then, I poured it into the hoverbike until it was full.
“Not sea water, but I hope it’s close enough,” I said.
I found that the plastic divider between the two seats had been on backwards, so I turned it around and put it on the other way.
When we tried it that way, my wife said she had even less room, and so we put it back the way it had been.

I knew we were only a mile or two from my grandmother’s house, so we set off again.
Salt water was apparently not what it wanted, as the flight was even worse from here. It would hop a few hundred feet, then I’d have to land again.

But, we got there.
When we got there, my cousins Joanne and Stephanie were coming out of the house.
“Hi Frank,” Joanne said. “We took care of everything here, you can head back home.”
“We’re not flying back,” my wife said.
“Stephanie lives in Southborough,” I said. “You can get a ride that far from her. I’ll fly back home and get the car.”
I lurched off towards home.
Dream ends

The strange part (yeah, none of that is strange to me) is that on my way into work this morning, I got caught in a traffic jam very much like the one in my dream on a very similar stretch of highway. Much like in the dream, a police officer motioned me off to the side. Unlike in the dream, he was just getting me to drive in the breakdown lane to go around.
It was still a very strange déjà vu feeling.

Comments

I remember reading a few of your AOF stories,

[evrgreen.livejournal.com]

.. from back in the good ol'/bad ol' days of NED !

[fortunecookie]
An interesting twist from an engineering angle of the traditional "flying" dream-> your subconscious is looking to free yourself from something which it feels is holding you down/back or negating your creativity. Being wary of flying too high is also telling you to not be over ambitious... keep looking for the right opportunity on the hoizon !

[/fortunecookie]

Re: I remember reading a few of your AOF stories,

[fbhjr.livejournal.com]

For what it is worth, I fly in a lot of dreams, but rarely well.
Usually it is to get out of some situation in the dream. Get across a pit, escape from something, or stuff like that.
More often it is just "jedi" like jumps.
What does the fortune cookie say about that?

Re: I remember reading a few of your AOF stories,

[evrgreen.livejournal.com]

I think that flying and abnormally big jumps are possibly similar in meaning in some dreams, but I've also had dreams where I could jump very far (like, 20 or 30 yards at a shot) but couldn't fly, and remember wishing that I could.
Usually jumping off a high place or over a deep hole signify your desire to take some risk to attain something. But then, if there was Darth Maul chasing after me with his double light saber, even if I weren't a Jedi I'd probably at least attempt some risky jumps to try to escape!