Last night's dream was a good one! I remembered it because I woke up a half-hour early, so it was interrupted. The switch to Standard Time always takes a few days to get accustomed to, right?

I may be mistaken, but the dream seemed to be in black and white rather than in color. The time was the 1930s, and I was on the luxury liner Normandie, bound for Europe. Since it was a dream, I was taller/thinner/richer and better dressed than I am in reality, otherwise they wouldn't have let me on the Normandie. While at a formal dinner in the beautiful Art Deco main dining room, a steward ran up to me with an urgent telegram (or more accurately, a radio-telegram) - a friend of mine in France was severely injured in a plane crash!

The friend in the dream was a glamorous aviatrix, the French equivalent of Amelia Earhart. She was injured, but the prognosis was good. The rest of the Atlantic crossing was a blur, but when I arrived in France, I naturally paid her a visit. She was doing fine, and I was relieved. We were platonic friends at that point, but in the past it seemed we must have had a thing going on. She told me that despite the recent crash, she was scheduled to fly an experimental new helicopter in an upcoming air show.

When the time came, I went to the air show at a large stadium to watch my unnamed friend fly the helicopter, which was a brand-new technology at the time. I must have read about or seen photos of German test pilot Hanna Reitsch flying a helicopter in 1938 inside a stadium, because that's exactly what I pictured in my dream. Unlike the twin-rotor design in Hanna Reitsch's flight, this was a single-rotor helicopter, with a large glass bubble over the pilot.

The flight started off well; my friend the test pilot took off vertically, and ascended straight up to an altitude of about 500 feet. Something went wrong, unfortunately, and the helicopter started shaking, and smoke began to pour out of the engine compartment. Suddenly, it lost all power, and plunged straight down. On impact, the glass shattered and the entire aircraft, as well as my friend, was completely flattened. At least she died doing the thing she loved!

I woke up shortly thereafter, and told my wife about it in detail. Her response was "Your dreams are really, really strange."