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 Four.
It was with some trepidation that I opened the letter that I had just received and then burst into tears when I saw that I had been accepted as one of the three man crew to take the latest space flight to an unmanned space station orbiting the earth.
I say three man which is a misnomer for I was the female selected to take this trip into space along with two men. I have vague flashes on the training that four men and myself along with another woman went through before the final selection was made. Half of this was physical and the other on the technicality of handling what would be my part in this flight and subsequent tasks aboard the space station.
My name is Amanda White though I’m always called Mandy, and the letter told me who the two men I would be going with on this flight that I had dreamed of for years. I had studied hard and now I was being rewarded for the effort that I had put into achieving my dream. Captain of the flight would be Jack Schwartz, known as BlackJack, a play on his name because of his German extraction though he was a real American from three generations. The other man was Patrick Murphy and known as Paddy with him being like BlackJack, several generations of being an Irish-American. Oh, I’m English by the way.
We had trained along with the other three until this selection and I felt sorry for the other woman, but, that’s the way the cookie crumbles as my American colleagues would say. It was a gruelling six months spent at NASA until this final day and we would now be taking this trip in two months time. BlackJack was married while both Paddy and I were single and it was only the fact that we were basically confined to the base that I had no chance of scoring with either of the four men during training, all being good looking men and had superb physiques as noted during some of our training programs.
I played coy at our news interview when I was asked the question at how did I feel at being in close contact with two males in the confined space of the modules cockpit. With the word feel being used in the question, I had to hold back the answer which would have been ‘with both hands’.
After two months of having our last training in the cockpit simulator, the day finally arrived for our space mission, and I was a bag of nerves when fully kitted out when we made our way to the top of the gantry and entered the shuttle. This was still two hours away from the scheduled time of take off because we still had lots of checks to make while the clock was being counted down and given a running commentary on how all our systems were showing back in the control room. With us stretched out on our backs, the position I liked when a man was on top of me, we were firmly strapped in having completed our checks and we watched and heard the countdown getting ever closer to take off.
‘All systems are go,’ came the controllers voice. ‘Initial firing is commencing,’ and we heard and felt the first firing of the propulsion units and then zero hour was there and we felt the massive power vibrate throughout and heard that we had lift off.
The noise was terrific as we started and began to feel the pressure on our bodies as we started on our voyage, being pressed closer to our seats as the speed built up and we were away, flying up into the stratosphere and then on into space once being freed from the Earth’s gravity. Once we reached this stage, the first propelling unit fell away as the second unit took over to carry on pushing us up to the stars
‘You’re looking good,’ came the voice again as we felt the ship roll a little as it settled us onto our flight path, and with the ship moving now at an angle, we could see the whole world through our windows and it was the most wonderful sight I’d ever seen. I’d seen pictures and videos of this when down below, but now I was seeing for real and nearly creamed my knickers at the kick it gave me.
*
I don’t know how long we were in the cockpit of our module having shook off our second stage but we soon had the station in our vision as we approached and it was now that BlackJack took over to control our approach to the docking station. This was what he had been practicing in the simulator, this procedure in docking and my heart was in my mouth as we crept ever closer until with a gentle bump, we were there and had the locking arms clamp us firmly to the entrance of the space station.
It was virtually an obsolete thing now and not manned but it still gave Earth a lot of statistics while circling the planet. We were just to check over all that it held and see if it would last for quite some years to come. I was glad that we’d arrived and we could strip off our space suits which were rather cumbersome when you had the need of the toilet.
We entered the airlock and when all were inside, the outer door was locked and we activated the oxygen system so that we could breathe without our helmets on when inside. This was a relief when we were able to do this when we entered the station, getting our helmets off first before moving off in the weightlessness to find our accommodation first.
We had had practice of doing this before in an aircraft quite a few times but there’s nothing like having the experience for real. We bumped about quite a bit as we had to adjust our arm, leg and body movements to be able to move about without banging our heads on pipe work. It was out of this world, (ha-ha), to float in air as we pulled ourselves along and sometimes pushing with our feet to propel forward, fending off the sides of the tunnel with our hands.
Knowing the layout of the station, we soon found where the accommodation was and separated to each take one of the eight rooms that would be our sleeping place for the month that we expected to stay up here.