THAT NIGHT

I'm back at my old high school, coaching an Italian version of waterpolo. It's rowdy and rough. I'm glad I'm just watching. I showed up with a three-ring binder, so the players assumed I was the referee, a position called the Vartena (distortion of English "bartender".) I'm not the referee! It's not a rulebook, it's my dream notebook. I don't even know the rules!

But then, as I watch them, it's obvious they don't know the rules either.

Or care...

Oh, shit. In the deep end, someone's deep down... and not moving! I dive in, slicing diagonally through the scrimmage, and pull her up. It's my friend Andrea. She's limp. The others ignore me, or don't believe she's really drowning, so alone I push her to the side and drag her out. She's either unconscious or dead.

I try to revive her. The others keep ignoring the crisis and play on.

The nightmare goes on and on.

At LAST, she gasps and opens her eyes. Alive. No thanks to them!

I hate this game.

THE NEXT DAY

The San Francisco Chronicle says that at Burlingame High, the next high school over from mine, a girl on the swim team named Angela suddenly just... stopped dead in the water. The coach tried to revive her, but she was dead. For no reason.

Why "Vartena"? I still don't know--I never followed it up to find out if this might be the family's name, or the coach's name--or the name, perhaps, of someone who didn't bother to pull Angela out in time, and is now haunted by that...

Why did I dream of this pool death, but set it in my high school, and change the name of Angela, who I never knew, to my friend Andrea? I'm not sure.

But I do identify with Angela's death. Our school was a near-twin of Burlingame High, and I too was forced to "play" water polo--that is, risk being deliberately held under and murdered if the coach looked away too long. I was small, the others were bigger (mostly two years older than me), and they thought drowning little kids was funny. "Hey, we're just playing--can't you take a joke?" was their chronic excuse. We don't hold you under that long. No one really gets killed. Right?

Wrong. My worst fears were real all along.

36 YEARS LATER

I'm transcribing my 1980s dreamjournals fully, and just discovered a detail I'd overlooked when I first posted this dream in 2001. Somehow I omitted that the dream claimed 'Vartena' was descended from the English word 'bartender'!

Why does this matter? Well... back in 1986, after writing the dream down, and finding that report on the real highschool pool death paralleling the dream, I went off to work, at Stanford's main library. Amid the new books was one on West African languages. I opened it to a section on loan-words. Example? 'Masénja' was descended from the English word 'messenger'.

Not all psychic hits--or very unlikely coincidences, if you prefer--are about life and death. But Vartena/bartender's echoing of Masenja/messenger is equally unlikely--and worth noting. Certainly if I'd dreamt this after reading the book and the news, we'd see this as obvious cause and effect--the dream playing making up its own plausible cross-language mutation of this sort. But when the effect precedes the cause...

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