December 22, 1996: Plane Crash in TV Land

The dream began as I was driving on an access road near the interstate, listening to the radio. I was listening to my favorite morning show, and they were telling of an airplane disaster at the local airstrip -- apparently there was an explosion that began with a spark of static electricity, and LOTS of people died (even though it is a tiny airport).

I work at CNN, and when I got to work, my producers had decided that the accident was actually sabotage, and they somehow knew of a clue: a long, human hair found at the site of the explosion. This was somehow a link to the saboteur.

Myself and two other people from my unit (Natalie and Julie, our writer and assistant producer) were sent to the neighborhood around the airstrip (MY neighborhood) just to browse around and try to find what we could find. I drove to the spot where I'd been when I heard about the explosion, and got out of the car: through some bushes, on the other side of the road from the interstate, I saw a cluster of houses around a cul-de-sac that didn't connect to the access road.

I climbed through the bushes and reached the cul-de-sac. The houses were a kind of fake Bavarian style, with diamond-pane windows and steeply pitched roofs. They were yellow with dark green highlights... not at all authentic. I noticed that each house had three street addresses on it, and realized that they were triplexes.

I went into one of the houses, and found a hallway running through the middle of it with three "front doors" in it. I rang the bell at one door, and got no answer. I went to the next one, and an old man opened the door. I explained I worked for CNN and was looking for people who might have been at the airstrip when the explosion happened, and he let me in.

The room inside was small and crowded, with lots of bookshelves. It was very gothic, but with plenty of windows to the outside. There was a recliner in the middle of the room with an even older man laid back in it, and a younger man was standing nearby, a little older than me, but not by much. He was very muscular and had long, dark hair and a thick beard. The oldest man in the recliner spoke to me first.

"I heard about that terrible accident," the oldest man said to me, and I realized that I knew him. He was Eddie Albert, the actor who played Oliver Wendell Douglas, the main character on Green Acres. I asked him if he was Mr. Albert, and he said yes. Rolling his eyes, he asked, "I guess you watched me while you were growing up, right?" and I said, "Actually, I watched you in RERUNS while I was growing up... I'm sure you didn't want to hear that!" He laughed at that, and at the same time, my co-workers from CNN showed up, wondering where I was.

Julie and Natalie started going through Eddie Albert's apartment like a couple of police detectives looking for evidence, while I kept talking to Mr. Albert. His hands were very mottled, almost purple, and I asked him what had happened to them. He said, "They tried to shut down on me," which I took to mean that he had circulation problems. I realized then that Natalie and Julie didn't know whose apartment they were in, so I asked them, "Have you ever seen Green Acres?" Julie (who is younger than the rest of us) hadn't, but Natalie had, and she was as enthralled as I was to meet Eddie Albert, as prone and weak as he was.

The youngest man in the apartment, with the long hair and the beard, was now naked and covering himself in thick oil from a jar. I'm gay, and I found him VERY attractive, but I tried to avoid staring because I was around co-workers. I felt very awkward with him being naked around two female co-workers, but neither of them seemed to notice him. The other old man, who I now realized was a butler, explained to me that Mr. Albert's assistant was about to go through a time-machine kind of device, to live in an "alternate today."

"It's like the alternate universe's version of today, right?" asked Eddie Albert.

"He refers to it as the 'opposite' of today," replied the butler.

It suddenly occurred to me that the long hair found at the site of the explosion could have come from this long-haired man, and that neither the butler nor Eddie Albert had made this connection. My alarm clock went off then, so I never saw the machine that was going to transport the younger guy to the alternate "day," nor did I find out who this guy was or why he would want to cause a disaster.

Though I found the guy very attractive, I saw no clue that his relation to the Eddie Albert group was sexual... in fact I remember someone in the dream mentioning that he had a wife. I'm not sure what purpose he served.