(3/27/05) the engine was beyond hope

(Entered in paper journal at 2:55 PM at Starbucks on 1st Street and 7th Avenue in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I was in a small boat being driven by a man who was older than I and my "teammates," as if we were older children and he a teacher.

I looked in the back of the boat to see a sphere of white metal that was supposed to be the outboard motor. It had six "connections" coming out of its otherwise smooth surface. The connections were either hexagonal nuts or hoses connected to the holes by hexagonal connectors. The motor was slightly submerged below the water, its top maybe six inches below the surface.

Either one or two of the "valves" or "connections" suddenly popped. Now in their place were just holes. The situation was dangerous. Either the water pouring through the holes would cause a bad reaction with the chemical in the sphere, or the chemicals in the sphere would escape more and more quickly until their buildup would cause a spontaneous combustion and explosion.

We were now going along a bridge. A few of us called up to the leader/driver. We were now in a car like an SUV, driving along a covered part of a bridge, about 150 feet over the river (we had just been in?). The driver was slowly pulling over.

The sphere was still in the back of the SUV, as if the SUV were the boat and the sphere, the SUV's engine. The driver asked us to check the XXXXX on the engine. We said it was beyond hope.

He ahd stopped and pulled over the vehicle. He told us all to get out and get away, that he would check on the engine himself. We all walked away steadily but not too quickly from the vehicle, aware that it could explode at any time.

I and a couple others stopped after a moment, though, because we knew that the driver should have known by now that the engine situation was hopeless and that he, too, needed to get away before it exploded.

We turned around and stood for a second, trying to figure out whether we had enough tie to rick a trip back to the engine to get the driver a safe distance from the vehicle as well. I think we determined that the success was highly uncertain but that we would head back anyway, just out of integrity to the team as a whole, to every last person.