From what I read, there are several ‘Dream’ stereotypes that (nearly) everyone experiences. There is the ‘Searching’ scenario where you are lost and can’t find your way or can’t find whatever it is you are looking for. Being caught naked in public is common as well. The weird part is that nobody notices and you are the only one agonizing. The dream you are being chased, by anything (person, animal, a mugger, police, etc.) is high on the list as well. I’ve been dragged through all of those dreams and I usually dream myself awake.
When I was a kid, 10 or 11, our barnyard was big enough to improvise a baseball field. Home plate was in front of a shed on the other side of the fence, it served as a backstop. In straight away center field, 130-140 ft. away was the barn. We needed at least 3 players, the pitcher, a batter and a fielder. If the batter hit the ball and made it all the way around the bases to home before the fielder could relay the ball to the pitcher covering home, he got to bat again. If you get put out everybody rotates; oh yea, if you hit a fly ball that gets caught, you’re out and you rotate. We played that game several times a week, all summer.
Then we all grew up and the barnyard went back to the cow and chickens. A decade later I was in the army, a parachute rigger and for fun, riggers became skydivers. We had our own parachutes purchased from military surplus stores, modified to suit our purpose. Military pilots needed flight time and we needed a ride up to about 7,000 ft. where we leaped out (free fall) for about 30 seconds before we pulled the ripcord and floated down under a nylon canopy. When the pilots ran out of fuel or it got dark we all went home. Then my contract with the army ran out and I came home for real.
Sometime after that I had a dream. I was up in the air amongst puffy little cumulus clouds, the ground maybe 7,000 ft. below and I was falling. The falling was easy, I knew how to control my free fall. If there was a concern it was that I wasn’t wearing a parachute. I trust that every sky diver who ever experienced an opening shock had given thought to the risk of malfunction and certainly the consequence of no parachute at all. There (in my dream) I was closing in on the 3rd rock from the sun at about 100 mph. It was time to pull the ripcord. With enough experience you know when it’s time, it’s when you can discriminate with the naked eye between individual trees by their size and different color of leaves. It was time.
I tried to determine just where I would impact and recognized the up-rushing ground. To my surprise I was over our old barnyard, the shed/backstop and the barn in center field. It just came natural to turn on my right side and stretch my left (top) leg out behind me and slide on my right hip. I made contact, plowing up sod and turf, waking up from the dream precisely in the moment I stopped. With a perfect hook slide I was safe at 2nd base. Wide awake I lay there in bed thinking, ‘OMG’ a pause and ’That was Awesome!’ My dad had subdivided our little acreage into lots and sold them several years before I enlisted but in my dream it was 1950 again. But after that there were many times the exact same dream came back again to wake me from sound sleep. I had given up skydiving, it was (too expensive) and enrolled in college as a 24 year-old freshman. But I made the baseball team, pitched a lot of batting practice, coached 1st base and got to play now and then. In 1968 I graduated 88 in my class of 188.
I can’t remember the last time I had the hook slide dream, sometime after college but I do remember the last time I actually made a hook slide. It was in the early 1980’s in a church league softball game. I was on 2nd base and our batter was good at moving runners up, putting the ball in play. I was wearing cutoff sweat pants, bare legs, never thought I would be sliding anywhere. I told the guy coaching 3rd base that if our guy got a hit I was going to watch him and not the ball. I would make the turn at 3rd and he had to promise, if it looked like there would be a play at the plate to stand in my way and flag me down. We got the hit, he waved me home but I saw right away the catcher setting up to take the incoming throw and I slid without thinking, a reflex act, serious mistake. I was safe at home, scored the run. The ground around home plate was packed hard as concrete and my cutoffs slid up out of the way, offered no protection at all. The Third Degree abrasion, the worst, deepest kind, from mid thigh up through mid buttox; I didn’t have to look or ask, it went numb and I knew I was in serious trouble.
I was incapacitated, couldn’t stand, sit or lie down for nearly a week, half naked on pain killers, the doctor apologized for laughing. Who in their right mind would slide bare ass into home plate in a church league softball game? It was the last time I slid at any base, any game, ever. I never spoke to the guy coaching 3rd base again either. We had stopped attending that church; the preacher was a jerk and his flock a bunch of self righteous assholes but I wanted to finish the summer league. I can’t remember dreaming the hook slide dream after that, not ever again. I’m not making this up. If I were to make up a baseball dream where someone did something really stupid, I would have cast myself as the clever, slippery dude who got the last laugh. I’m surprised I ‘outed’ myself here but at my age I have outgrown and dismissed whatever pride I once prized. Feeling good about feeling good is alright but the “ain’t I great” crap is just that, fodder for an undeserving ego. The scar took nearly a year to heal up but my wife forgave me right away for my folly. If you find yourself free falling in a dream without a parachute, I recommend the hook slide. When you wake up you can sit anywhere you like, even stand up and walk around without waiting for your butt to heal.
Such a pleasure to turn these stones Frank and listen to your stores. Like Cormac McCarthy, whose books I 've been listening to a lot lately on Audible, your writing style suites me to a tee! rr
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