ForeWord

Dream:

A series of pictures or events in the mind of a sleeping person.

Oxford Dictionary.

A dream is a type of mental activity that occurs during sleep. It usually consists of visual images that tell a story, although the sequence of dream events is usually mystifying. They may be
influenced by internal physical factors such as hunger, thirst or indigestion. External factors may affect dreams too, such as an alarm clock can be transformed into a dream telephone call and therefore carry on sleeping.

Dreams are often an illogical combination of events from the past of the dreamer, from his or her daily life, and of his or her imagined future. Though erotic dreams are often inspired by desire, lust or pure covetousness. These too are somewhat disjointed but when on waking, if the person can recall the dream it then runs in a logical sequence, which is the form used in the following dreams.

Dream One.

What I had was not a dream as such but a nightmare though I suspect it still comes in the category of being called a dream.

I left the building where I worked and made my way down to the train station. I checked my watch and I was on time as usual as I showed my travel pass to the ticket inspector, and I made my way to the platform for my train from Grant Station to the next town down the line, Waverley. This was where I lived and it was only a journey of thirty minutes.

I bought the evening paper as I always did at the kiosk, wondering for the umpteenth time as to why it was called an evening paper when it was obviously printed in the late morning for it to be on sale at this time of the day though it was usually a rehash of what was in the morning papers.

I walked onto the platform and the train was still standing there with its doors open. They must be getting cold inside I thought for the wind was getting up and it being just a few days into the New Year. The snow had settled during the day and was now crusty underfoot and very slippery as the ice formed as were all the roads making driving very hazardous.

I sat in my usual seat in the last carriage and looked at my watch again to see that I was on time, it being six twenty five precisely. A few other people got on and sat down as I began to read my paper. The train doors made a quiet hissing noise as they slid shut and the train moved slowly off without any sense of it being in motion a couple of minutes later. The only noticeable thing was the fact that the wind had stopped blowing into the carriage.

I read the sports section on the back page first because tonight was the home football match against an old rival team. As usual, this pundit spent half the article telling you why the home team should win, and in the second half was how they could lose. This then meant that in the paper next day, he could quote from whichever half of this article he wanted to use to say that he had told us what the outcome would be.

I turned the paper over and had a queer sensation touch me that all was not as it seemed to be, and I couldn’t shake off this sense of unease. I looked up from the headlines which was only really saying that of the morning’s paper, to try and see if I could make out what was causing me to have these feelings of misgiving. Something was missing and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

I looked out of the window at the snow covered fields, hearing the clickety clack, clickety clack as the train sped along the track. Then it struck me of what I was not hearing! Nobody was talking to a friend, neighbour or fellow passenger. No mobile phones were sending out their silly little tunes to give out silly little messages. It was the first week of January and nobody had a cold, or at least sniffing or giving out a hacking cough. There weren’t any of the passengers that I could see, reading a newspaper, rustling it as they turned over a page, or looking at a book. They all were just sitting there, staring at each other, lost in little worlds of their own.

I then noticed their pallor, the white skin of their faces and the dull listlessness of their eyes. No sunshine and being bored to death with their job was my first thought. Even the man sitting opposite me appeared to look at me with dead dark staring eyes, not seeing me at all, but seemed to not be there at all. Even this last carriage of the train seemed colder than usual until I realised that the heating system couldn’t be working.

I tried to shake off this feeling of foreboding I had as I again started to read my newspaper, and the stop press section caught my eye.

‘Local train disaster! The six twenty eight from Grant Road was in collision with a juggernaut truck. In all, twenty six passengers were killed.’ It didn’t register at first.

I looked up and idly counted the number of people I could see and got to the figure of twenty five. It said twenty six I said to myself and then shot bolt upright. With me it made twenty six! I hastily scanned the date of the paper and saw that it was indeed today’s newspaper, and we had left Grant Road station at precisely six twenty eight. I crushed the paper in my hands in confusion as my mind tried to grasp what I had just read. How could it report in the latter hours of the morning of a crash that allegedly happens later that evening?

I panicked and lifted my arm and pulled the emergency chain and a few seconds later came the screeching sound of the brakes being applied to the metal wheels of the train. I sat there as the train slowed and looked at my paper to see the stop press item start to fade away till there was just a blank space left. All the passengers were looking at me, even those who had had their backs to me turned round, their blank dark dead eyes staring at me. I looked up at the chain that was still held in my hand and read the warning notice that was printed below it. ‘For wanton or improper use of the emergency alarm system, the penalty is death.’

I couldn’t tear my eyes away from this sign until the train came to a halt. It was then that I saw that we had come to a stop, our carriage, the last one of the train, was astride the road crossing of Memorial Drive. The barrier was down, but that was not going to stop the forty foot truck and trailer that had just jack knifed on the road and was sliding on the icy road towards us. As it crashed through the road barrier, I gave one last despairing look at the blank dead faces looking accusingly at me as I hung onto that emergency cord and tried to brace myself for its inevitable collision with this last carriage.

This was when I came sharply awake in my bed, sweating profusely and feeling rather sick at this horrible nightmare.

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Author’s note:

It was three months after having this dream, or rather, nightmare related to me that I read of a train crash at a railway crossing. The train driver reported that on having had the emergency chain pulled, he had applied the brakes to bring the train to a stop which left the last carriage across the section of road that crossed the tracks. Looking back down the train, he saw the jack knifed truck smash through the barrier and into the last carriage of the train, virtually demolishing it and with many helpers, got twenty six dead passengers out of the wreckage.

D é j à vu?

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