…That night ushered in another profound dream that resonated deep within me.

I rode on the back of a motorcycle, speeding along a path constructed of fresh soil that had been worked and shaped into a dirt road.

We circled in a clockwise direction up the grade toward the east, then to the south. As milliseconds passed, I began to recognize the location: the cloverleaf onramp from Page Mill onto Highway 280 northbound. But it was constructed of dirt.

I was on the back of the vehicle, holding onto…someone.

We rolled over rocks and gravel, jumping over branches and careening up embankments as I held onto some unknown form in front of me. From my perspective the motorcycle seemed huge, like it was built for a giant. In my mind’s eye we were twelve feet off the ground.

There was an urgency to get to our destination, which I didn’t fully understand. Finally, we rode up to the level of the “living.” There were houses and fences and landscaping. We had to make it back by dinner. 

After the final ascent, we meandered through the neighborhoods from this shack to that mansion. We had risen to the “human” stage where the zombies were no longer. 

I clung to his torso—I had no choice or I would fall off. And the faster he rode, the stronger I gripped. It was as if I were forced to show intimacy by squeezing him as we rode; but really it was self-preservation.

“He’s dead,” Pete said.

Shock ran through my body like an electrical current and my gut tightened as if gripped by a boa constrictor. I stood there with the phone to my ear and an empty, dumbfounded expression on my face. An evening that started as a fun gathering of friends and reminiscences of old times had come to a sudden halt.

* * *

Four hours earlier my wife, Nancee, and I were preparing to host our former neighbors from Mountain View. Steve and Martha were coming to visit, and we wanted to make a good impression.

Nancee and I had met at my high-school buddy’s wedding. I found her intoxicating: long, flowing red hair and slim, long legs that she used to prance and sway to the music of the B-52s. Early on we engaged in dinners, wine, and romance. Then, when I almost broke it off after two weeks of dating, she adamantly pointed out that we had gotten in a rut and not done anything active together that didn’t involve dining or sex. We tried a few outside activities and quickly found a connection. A few months later we had become active partners together, rollerblading, skiing, windsurfing, and running. Lust had transformed to kinship, soul mates.

Nancee and I were both busy preparing the meal and sipping wine in the process. We had planned a sleepover for Rebecca and Brandon at a friend’s house, so the preparations felt easy and unencumbered.

“Martha Stewart says the way to be relaxed while entertaining is to have the first glass before your guests arrive,” Nancee said with a giggle.

The doorbell rang. Steve and Martha had arrived. We had wine chilling in the fifty-bottle fridge and a bottle of red at room temperature to follow that. We cracked open some Chardonnay and began touring them through the house.

Steve and Martha performed the perfunctory “oohs” and “aahs.” These reactions were followed by quick glances toward each other and knowing smiles. They lived in the Bay Area, and we had moved from there. Our trappings were very lavish compared to Bay Area homes that were older and densely compact. We had a two-story home on a hill with a stone facade, a manicured lawn, and a small grove of redwood trees along the lower edge of the property. We showed them the upstairs primary bathroom with its built-in jacuzzi tub and 270-degree view of the mountains.

When we got to the kitchen Martha’s eyes got big and she let out a gasp as she covered her mouth. It was a large open room with granite counters and a granite-slab island, including an integrated gas stove and oven. Behind the stove was a retractable vent that elevated when in use. There was a large brushed-stainless fridge and a window view of the large backyard with its pool and built-in waterfall. For most couples this was something unattainable in the Bay Area.

I commented about the wine we were drinking, playing armchair sommelier. “This is from a winery we visited in Napa. It’s heavy in the malolactic fermentation category with a creamy, even buttery finish.”

I pulled the tri-tip off the barbecue and tented it with foil to let it rest. I opened a bottle of Gundlach Bundschu Zinfandel; it was the perfect wine to go with the rich flavorful marinated cut of beef. It had deep, earthy flavors of black cherry and pepper but with a smooth, rich finish.

We sat down to dinner in the formal dining room, its walls painted the color of Cabernet. We ate and talked and reminisced about old times; of kids’ birthday parties in the neighborhood, quick catch-ups over the back fence, and windsurfing.

As the phone rang, I swiftly retrieved the cordless handset from the kitchen counter, well within the view of Nancee and our guests. On the other end of the line was my brother.

“Phil, it’s Pete,” he said in a voice uncharacteristically curt and serious. An urgency tinted his voice, sending a sudden tightness to my throat.

“Something’s happened . . . he’s been in an accident and . . . well, he’s not OK.”

There was a pause as Pete collected himself. And then—

“He’s dead.”

“Do you remember me flying in a plane as a child?” I asked my mother. After my second session with Joy and the very vivid image of the trees, I needed to understand its origin. I had called her over my lunch hour to find out more about where I had traveled as a young child, and whether we had stayed in any high-rise hotels.

“Well . . . let me think about that,” my mother said, pausing for a good ten seconds. “Well, we did fly to Tulsa on our way to Table Rock Lake for the family reunion.”

“When was that?” I asked with a growing sense of curiosity.

“Hmmm . . . let me think. You were about six and Peter was a very young toddler. So it would have been . . . probably the summer of 1966.” She went on to describe how we had flown to Tulsa, then taken the whole family, including her parents—a total of nine people in two cars—to Arkansas for a family reunion. 

As she recounted the details, a nervous energy tingled through me, memories stirring like leaves in a gust of wind. I recalled the reunion, vaguely. But had forgotten about the aircraft. As a child, I had developed an affinity for flying on airplanes and a strong desire to sit in a window seat. I loved looking at the landscape and roads and cars below. It pulled me out of myself and gave me a sense of awe. It was logical that I would have looked intently out the window as we landed and took off and would have noticed the trees. 

But what was my brain trying to tell me about this trip? As I thought more about the reunion I remembered some other things. The boat slips on the shore. Swimming in the pool. Getting reprimanded for it. Peter, my younger brother, being just a baby. But what did that have to do with trauma? And if it even did, why couldn’t I recall anything bad happening?

I got in the car, heading home from San Mateo. The sun was just setting over the coastal mountains as I drove toward Crystal Springs Reservoir on Route 92. As my brain adjusted to the twilight, a memory condensed in my mind.

The inside of the room looked like a bus, but the long tubular shape lurched and shifted sideways far too much to be a bus. The wheels couldn’t possibly move like that . . . the motion was all wrong. 

I looked out the window and saw that we were hundreds of feet above the trees. And they were moving rapidly below us. I pressed my face hard against the cool plexiglass trying to see the trees, the grass, animals, maybe insects . . . closer, closer. Then an abrupt BUMP as the wheels hit the tarmac.

That night I had another dream. It had such a vivid reality to it and a feeling of importance that told me it came from the same era as the others.

I was in a big pond with rocks and footbridges and gazebos. I had to get to the cove where the young child was still sleeping. (Was it my son? My younger brother? A younger version of myself?)

In my hand was the handlebar of some sort of contraption: like a Razor scooter that rode on water. Not a Jet Ski but a waterski with propulsion. 

I hit the throttle and scooted across the water, quickly approaching three boulders that blocked the cove. I gassed it again and careened off the first boulder onto the second. I bounced off that sharper, more upright boulder and headed for the third: the final test. In one spectacular motocross move I ricocheted off the third boulder and into the cove, pulling up to the shanty that stood on the beach. 

I went into the room to find the young boy sleeping in a high bunk bed, safe from the poisonous insects and spiders that inhabited the lower portions of the shack. 

“Are you OK?” I asked. 

“Yeah . . . just resting.” I felt a huge sense of relief come over me.

I sped back to the main lake, to the gazebo and footbridge and let off the throttle. Just then I heard the captain’s voice from a jetliner far above over the radio: 

”Now approaching Runway One-Niner.” 

I was instantly transported into the aircraft above and looked down on a familiar coastline with piers and waterways fanning out from the edge of a highly populated city.

I woke up with the realization that this was another significant dream and clearly relevant to whatever it was my brain was trying to work out. But it had a lot of mixed themes and was complicated, to say the least.

The airline reference mixed with water was confusing. When had I ever heard that kind of lingo? And what about the piers and waterways? And why were water sports mixed with flying aircraft and visuals of piers? 

I sat down and spent a few minutes sketching out the coastline I’d seen in the dream. From the texture of it, I guessed it was around 1966. It seemed correlated with the other dreams around that time as if coming from the same sedimentary layer. I also knew from the conversation with my mother that I had flown on an aircraft in 1966, at age six.

Triangulation. Like identifying the scene of a crime.

Viewing the sketch, I backed away to gain some perspective. Something about that image resonated in my mind as if I’d seen it before. Maps and satellite pictures I’d been exposed to as an adult told me it might be related to San Francisco. Pulling up a series of aerial images from the web, I came across the section of coastline along the wharf.

It was a dead hit. 

The piers fanning out radially as the coastline curved from Fisherman’s Wharf and the Ferry Building to what is now Chase Center matched exactly the drawing I had just made. Somehow, I had seen this image from hundreds of feet up.

But what about the nautical lingo and the phonetic alphabet occurrence? I couldn’t grasp how, as a child, I might have heard that language.

I thought back about flying in aircraft as a young teenager visiting family on the East Coast. In those days you could put headphones on and listen to a choice of different stations. One of them was the raw audio of the cockpit crew talking to the tower. They didn’t have televisions in the seats at that time, so audio was the next best thing. Maybe I had heard the phrase “Now approaching Runway One-Niner” in the headphones on that flight. But why was this significant enough for me to remember it fifty years later? And was it even real or some made-up fantasy? 

I continued my web search, looking up “Runway One-Niner” in relation to SFO. Another direct hit. It turns out that runways are named according to their orientation relative to due north. For example, runway “nine” means ninety degrees from due north (they drop the zero).

I recalled windsurfing for years out at Third Avenue off the coast of Foster City. Aircraft were constantly cued up to land as they flew low over the San Mateo bridge, heading westward toward San Bruno and the San Francisco Airport runway. But this didn’t line up with the image in my dream. The typical landing pattern at SFO brings you over the portion of the bay near Foster City, not the wharf. I wouldn’t have seen that image. 

In my obsessive state I had to know the truth. If the facts didn’t line up, then perhaps this whole thing was fantasy on my part. And if it was fantasy, then perhaps the other dreams and flash-frozen memories I was experiencing were unreliable as well. Perhaps I had made them all up and I was just a neurotic person, disturbed for no particular reason. 

On the contrary, if the facts did line up, then maybe there was something real to my disturbance. And if there was something real, I had to get to the bottom of it. Otherwise, I’d be denying my own experience. And in doing so I would be that lost soul, forever plagued by ignorance, unable to accept what had happened to him.

As I continued my research, I found that there was another runway at San Francisco International Airport. It’s not the main one and it’s shorter. It’s used in less common weather conditions and for lighter aircraft that don’t need as much run-up. And it’s oriented toward the south-southwest. Aircraft landing in a southerly wind will typically land on this south-facing runway: Runway 19. And it is verbally articulated as “runway one-niner.” (In radio vernacular “nine” is distinguished from the similar-sounding “five” by adding the extra syllable.) 

Viewing the whole configuration in Google Maps, I saw that the approach toward Runway 19 took the aircraft just south of the Fisherman’s Wharf region of San Francisco, which would have been viewable from a window on the right side of the plane. The image of piers, the aircraft, the water, and the audio all lined up to the moment when we approached SFO on our way home from the reunion. 

But why was my subconscious brain so fixated on that particular flight back from Tulsa? Did something happen on the flight? Or did something happen before or afterward? 

It seemed important, somehow, to know what my brain was trying to tell me. This compact little experience had clearly had a major impact on my life. I had immersed myself in windsurfing as an adult. Skimming across the water at thirty miles an hour had become my new drug. It seemed to hit something central within my subliminal mind and satiate my nervous system. 

Windsurfing—particularly as I got good at it and graduated to smaller, faster gear—was like flying over water. The mylar sails were like wings. The short, sleek boards like Jet Skis. And once engaged in windsurfing, I was compelled to call the SFO weather line each afternoon, exposing myself daily to the same language I’d heard from the airline captain fifty years earlier. Two disparate modes of transportation—aircraft and watercraft—using the same weather information and the same language.

I began to consider if gravitating to windsurfing as an adult was a way for my brain to re-create this image from 1966. The activity, the language, the visuals. The sound of the rushing wind across the aircraft. The view of the white caps on the bay as we came in for our approach. The feeling of being shaken by recent experiences. The way that chaos in my life was being mirrored by the motion of the aircraft on our approach.

I wonder sometimes if the events in our lives are less random than we think. If the human brain subliminally orchestrates our experience to bring us into proximity with the vaguely familiar, but for reasons that are unclear, at least to our conscious brains. Wind, water, tumultuous motion, mixed with the sounds of authority figures. All of this had been wrapped up into a bizarre dream that seemed, like a screenplay written in code, to come from the summer of 1966.