a morning dream

we were in an Avis van, my mom, my dad, and me. we were heading to the airport to go out of the country, to africa I think. when we got to the airport, it was really big but kind of run down. it looked like a mid-80's terminal with the architecture and old paint. when we got on the plane it turned out that there was a little problem with the throttle control. due to some wire, the engines would suddenly get cut, and then start again. it was like if you had a bad connection with a wall jack and the thing you had plugged in couldn't decide to stay on or turn off, so it would just flicker. the pilot, who was this old guy with wispy gray hair in a horseshoe around his head and a kind of shabby but not unclean outfit, was able to keep the plane from falling out of the sky. the trick, you see, is to use the potential energy from being high up in the air to give some speed when the engines cut out. at one point, (I was sleeping in the coach section, curled up with one of those pillows), my mom woke me up because they had lost enough altitude that the ground was coming up. I looked out and couldn't see much in the dark, but it looked like a huge, black, ocean. in fact it was trees. from the ground, anyone standing in the path of the airplane would have seen a huge 747 clipping the canopy branches. at one point we got so low we actually chopped off the top centimeter of a tree branch reaching above the rest of the canopy, "that is a sight you don't see everyday".

the next thing we were in the Avis van again, but no longer in america. we had ditched the plane because it was taking too long and we had got a van and were going to the local airport (now in africa or something) to get a new flight to our final destination. when we got to the airport it was nice, and there were a lot of africans with yellow and green colored outfits walking around, and quite a few of them were in wheelchairs. "it must be because of the heat, that they don't want to walk". we came to a door that said 'Le colonie HaHa's', which was the name of the dominant group at the time. My mom reached for the door and I told her to stop and explained. the door led to a corridor that we couldn't see much about. there was another door 'The Boy's Hatanian' which I thought they were from Haiti and were obviously the second most powerful group. Their room was dark, as in a unused movie theater, and in the same fashion had stadium style seating but the seats seemed to all be facing uphill, towards the back of the theater. "Come on mom", we walked down to a lower level, where there was a door that led in the same direction as the corridor above, towards the airplanes.