When the 17 year old slept all manner of dream characters would burst onto his stage, bred from tremulous excitements each desperate to attach its own exotic half life to whatever narrative began to run as soon as the poor boy’s eyes closed.
However all I could remember after the dream was that somewhere in the middle of the imbroglio a faceless interloper had burst in delivering to me the weekend football scores. In the dream I had opened and held out the local broadsheet’s sports page, to find that the scores were exactly the same for both teams, and that the unusual result between the two dream teams was an identical score draw.
At my own helm on waking that Saturday I decided on a whim to ride across town to the football game my team was about to play. I pushed through apologetically to a place in the standing room at about half time among the twenty thousand already present. We were a dominant team in those days with some great players and were expected to win. We led all day but from nowhere in the last minutes, the other team kicked some goals and with sweeping unease I remembered for the first time my forgotten dream. One kick now could tie the scores. I remember for some reason looking at the lowering sky to see dark scud from the west rolling through just overhead. Duly next moment the ball moved rapidly left to right across my view and the last goal was kicked. My team had played 400 games since this last happened 24 years earlier before I was born.
This did not fit my self conception. Young man on the move in life grounded in modern rational education, who stepped out with confidence onto any bridge knowing that because of scientific learning and engineering principles it would stay in the air and not collapse under my weight. No one ever spoke about dreams that pre delivered sports results. How was this possible? It would be an embarrassment amongst friends to relate what had happened so it was quickly buried and forgotten.
Over time, from other observation and thinking, I have had no choice but to accept that some moments, even dream moments, could be sculpted and timed deliberately from the distant past. The dream was timed from the past organized to intersect with the real result of the match played out next day. Later in life other events challenged old ways of seeing. I have now been forced to take this dream and the event at the ground more seriously – future examples would later stack up that I would be a fool to deny.