It was the latter part of 1969 and I was on a paid vacation in the Republic of Viet Nam enjoying an after dinner drink with a couple of buddies at a beautiful resort (the NCO club) in Tay Ninh province. The drink of choice, New York Taylor champagne, was also the default as there was nothing else to drink. None of us cared for champagne, but it was all they had and it was cheap. There were four of us and we drank two or three bottles apiece and we all wandered back to our hooches stumbling drunk. I woke up the next morning with the second most horrible hang over of my life (the worst came about eleven years later). I was one sick puppy and thought maybe if I ate something I would feel better. I strolled over to the mess hall, er gourmet restaurant, and ate breakfast. It didn't help, and for the first time in my short Army career I went back to sleep during duty hours. I had a dream that I was standing on a precipice about 400 feet high and a Chinook helicopter came flying by from right to left. Just as it was directly in front of me and just below eye level, it flipped upside down, snapped in two pieces and fell to earth. As the the rear engine portion fell to earth it burst into flames.
I awoke from my sleep feeling much better and sauntered over to the company area and started helping the guys put together the weekly rations, water, mail, and ammunition that would be helicoptered out to the guys in the field. We had just finished setting all the supplies on the edge of the runway when I noticed a Chinook lifting off the ground at the south end of the runway. The Chinook had a sling load of concertina wire that was being ferried out to a forward fire base and as he lifted off the ground the helicopter appeared to have problems as it tilted forward and backwards and from side to side. It appeared he had lost hydraulics and could not maintain control of the aircraft. As the chopper gained altitude it started coming our way. By the time it reached us it was about forty feet off the ground and was still out of control. Once the chopper passed us and continued down the runway it seemed to straightened out and we all began to cheer thinking the pilot had finally gained control. And then the chopper turned to the right and the pilot managed to jettison its load. The load fell on the tail end of a Huey helicopter and cut the tail off, and then it disappeared behind a stand of rubber trees. We all began running down towards the end of the runway and as we approached the clearing we met people running towards us yelling that the chopper had flipped upside down and crashed to the earth.
For many years I was at a loss to explain or to even begin to comprehend how I, or anyone, could dream of an event and then watch the event happen in waking life. Nothing made any sense until I became a student of A Course in Miracles. As I wrote in my introduction I began reading The Book looking for a miracle that would help me regain my ability to swallow, only to find out there was much content advocating that this life and our world is a dream; a dream we had and are continuing to remember over and over. As I read this I found myself rejecting even the notion that this life and our world is a dream, until I remembered the dream of the helicopter crashing. Suddenly I could see how we can dream of a future event because we have dreamed this world and we are remembering this dream over and over in successive dreams.The dream of the helicopter crashing was nothing more than the memory of an event that had already occurred in the dream of life. How else can you explain prescience?
Later
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