THAT EVENING

I asked my dreams what their consensus was on going back to school and studying music. I seemed to be losing interest. Am I really unable to handle having a social life, dating, performing music?

Or is some side of me SABOTAGING my ambitions?

THAT NIGHT

My friend Tim owns a piano-boat: a small sailboat you can play. Raise the lid to catch a wind...

I've been working on a far bigger ship--a space yacht. They're testing all the equipment, and order me to test-fire their replica of a Roman catapult. The ship floats over the lake while I'm down on the shore; the projected impact site is just offshore. Thinking the catapult has the standard payload, I casually push the remote control button, and it fires. But some idiot loaded Tim's piano-boat into the catapult! The instrument soars in a long arc, then down into the lake with a huge twang and splash, fifty yards south of me in the lake. It goes right under of course. It may be smashed beyond repair--won't know till we dredge it up. I feel ashamed, responsible. I should have checked what they loaded.

I get a call from the yacht. Oh, no. It's worse. Apparently Tim was tuning the boat when it was flung. He's down there somewhere! With a friend, I raft out to the crash site and start fishing and diving. Snag Tim with a rope and pull him up. He's unconscious, but after squeezing him once, he spits out a lot of water and comes to. He seems quite all right, to my amazement! While unconscious, he hardly burned any oxygen.

Can we salvage the piano-boat too? There are six of us on the beach now, excluding Tim who's still coughing up bits of lake and really shouldn't be lifting pianos. I calculate the boat weighs a ton or two, but all of us together should just be able to manage. My calculations are way off--two of us easily lug it up on the beach. Set it up on the hard wet sand to drain.

And the sand slowly becomes the wood floor of my bedroom, and as I wake, the grand piano dissolves into glass, into air, into... gone.

NOTES THAT MORNING

• My friend Tim= serious commitment to music (he's a jazz guitarist with formidable technique)
• The arc of the flung piano-boat = I went back to school, largely for social life, partly for music. Enthusiasm at first, then freefall, drifting and crash... when I wasn't instantly and effortlessly rewarded with a band and a girlfriend and total piano-mastery and rave reviews as a composer...
• It only takes one to save Tim, only two to lift the piano = I asked my dreams if I have inner consensus on a musical career, but I don't NEED consensus! Silky the sexy playful part, and me/conscious discipline, are enough to salvage and carry my musical (and other) ambitions even if other parts drop out. All I have to do is... DO it.
• The spaceship, catapult, and crash with Tim on board = today I read Why Things Bite Back, a book on the inherent risks of complex designs--it examined the Challenger space-shuttle crash.
• And what's more complex and crash-prone than a career in the arts?

A WEEK LATER

Right after I had this dream, Tim came down with the flu and was flat on his back all week!

Psychic, symbolic... or BOTH?

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