I was 11 or so, living in a house in the hills with a view of San Francisco Bay. I liked to watch the freighters on the Bay, and planes slanting in to land at San Francisco International Airport. I'd seen hundreds; I knew their average and maximum size.

THE DREAM

Dark overcast with drifting mist-curtains. Can see miles much of the time, right across the Bay, to Mount Diablo. But not always. Clarity comes and goes.

A huge ship, THRICE as big as any I've seen before, sails out of a fogbank and crosses beneath the San Mateo Bridge heading south. Another... They're just SO big I doubt myself. Am I dreaming?

And wake.

A NOTE 50 YEARS LATER

As I type up this half-century-old dream, I look out the window here on Bernal Hill in San Francisco, and what I see is: the Bay, Mount Diablo and freighters EXACTLY the apparent size in my dream 50 years ago. It's partly that freighters are bigger now, but also, I'm just 3 km from the Bay, not 8 as I was then.

Were my dreams just prompting me to go lucid, with an absurdity I couldn't ignore? Or did the fog-banks line up just right to give a rare long view? Was I glimpsing my adult life, decades ahead?

Clarity comes and goes.

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