I walked into the cabin of an aeroplane and stood behind the pilots, who were shouting and screaming and trying, unsuccessfully, to steer the plane. As if it had been preprogrammed, or had a suicidal mind of its own, it was heading straight for the world trade center in Manhattan.
As the twin towers loomed larger in the front windows of the plane, I thought that it was a shame that the pilots couldn't pull the plane up even a fraction of a degree, because that would probably be enough to ensure that we missed the buildings, if they did it soon enough.
Calmly and in quite a detached way (probably because I knew that I hadn't died on 9/11), I accepted the fact that we were just about to hit one of the towers.
Notes for Freudian Interpretation
The night before the dream, I was talking to Ellen about how surprised I'd been to learn that it had been five years since September 11th. I really thought it was strange that, to me, it seems like it only happened a couple of years ago. Perhaps three, at the most. However, when I think of other things that happened in 2001, they seem incredibly distant. Indeed, the things that I did that day (to be honest, just a lot of watching the news -- at work, in a pub after work and then at home later on) seem as if they happened a lot more than five years ago. So why should I have been walking around under the impression that the event itself had occurred only a short while ago? By the end of a repetitive, rambling monologue of half-formed observations and poorly thought-through ideas, which Ellen tholed honourably, I’d worked out that the strange effect is probably the result of the fact that the narrative that starts with 9/11 and leads to the disaster in present-day Iraq (via Afghanistan, the anti-war protests and the invasion of Iraq) is actually pretty straightforward and feels as though it shouldn’t have needed five years in which to unfold.
Perhaps. I'm sure there are better reasons that I'm not seeing.
The best 9/11 dream I've heard was the one that my colleague, Mark Taplin had not long after the attacks. In it, a number of Lothian Regional Transport double-decker buses were flying into the old parliamentary headquarters, where we used to work, and we were all running around screaming and dying. You'd have to ask him what that was all about.