Weird Dream #4 (1978 edition)

I tend to have vivid dreams, and still recall a plane-crash dream I had when I was a kid. My mom's a total pack rat, so she saved a bunch of papers from my grade-school years. Perhaps one reason that dream remained so clear over the decades was that I had written it down—and my mom gave me that sheet of looseleaf paper today. Here, without further ado or editing, my write-up from about sixth grade:

The Huge Crash of '78 (a dream)

Amy Anderson and I were laying down on our backs on the front lawn. Somehow, all the grass has a kind of brownish color, but that didn't matter.

"There goes an American Airlines," I said, not caring that it was very low (about twenty feet above the Co-op's roof).

It continued on in its northerly-going path, engines aroar.

Then Amy A. practically shouted, "Look how low it's getting!" (It looked like it was going to crash into the O'Donnell's building.)

I thought there was a chance, a big one at that, that they were going to crash, but I decided to just watch and see what happened.

Then the plane started tipping from side to side. Finally, it tipped over and was flying up-side-down!

In some weird way it turned back over, and also must have backed up so that it was going a slightly different direction. Then it went over the corner of the O'Donnell's court and the engines quieted while the screams became louder. The next thing I knew the plane was right outside my house. A lady, who was in hysterics, screamed, "I know he's dead, I just know it. My husband is dead!"

I tried to comfort her by saying, "The odds are for you that husband's alive." She kept running anyway, but I didn't really care. I had other people to take care of.

I then went over to Debbie's house. She had either company or at least twenty plane crash survivors eating all her food up. I knocked and said, "Is Debbie there?"

The woman's reply was, "There's nobody named Debbie here."

I answered, "But she lives here."

"Not anymore," she said.

And that was the end of my dream.

I have omitted the numbered footnotes keyed to explanatory drawings. I'm impressed that although I used "laying" in place of "lying" (which I do to this day) and some of the wording's a little bizarre, everything was spelled and punctuated correctly. Now, if a bright sixth-grader can remember whether a period goes inside or outside parentheses or quotation marks, how come so many adults these days don't have a clue?