Futurepast

Dream, Pez's Birthday, 2008:

I am called on at last minute to introduce Hillary Clinton, who is campaigning. I had initial plans for the intro, but scrap these for reading a paragraph from a biography of Hillary--something that ended with "Politician, inventor, innovator" or something like that. I go up to address the audience and talk off the cuff while I thumb through the volume--I'd lost the page. I say that I'd had an intro prepared, but in place of that I'd read from this book that came out during her last campaign. I can't find the page. Hillary keeps walking in and saying in undertones that the intro can end. She wants me to finish so she can start her stump speech. Since I can't find the page--there are so many pictures!--I introduce her, using what I remembered of the paragraph, but wake up before I finish and before she can go to the podium.

As I woke, I found myself thinking two things:
First, I felt bad that my waking left Hillary in limbo, between intro and speech, in an eternally unresolved situation. My second thought was on all of those photographs--they were all pics of war--GIs in floppy hats sitting in the hatches of helicopters. Shattered jungle. So much strife. As I woke I felt perhaps it best that the speech was cut off by my waking up--her book was full of war and conflict. another candidate would be better. But then I remembered that in the dream the biography was written during her first campaign, that this dream may actually have been set in the future, that all the images of war were the result of a future administration that was ending in the dream, four years in the future. Her position as candidate seemed much stronger in that light.