Dream: Lake Jimi

I dreamed last night that I’d joined a group of young people on a car trip to a historic northern town. The place was home to a rather morbid tourist industry, for Jimi Hendrix, in this alternate reality, had drowned there in his car, while trying to cross a lake. (Cars were amphibious, but only under calm conditions.) In fact, we arrived by driving across the fatal water, and I was quite nervous about it, somewhat cramping the style of the carefree whippersnappers I was with.  While browsing the town’s emporia (which sold various Hendrix-related merchandise, including a computer-generated simulation of how he might have escaped his sunken car and what his music would sound like had he lived), I gathered that younger visitors frequently capsized their cars on purpose upon departure, in order to achieve maximum identification with Jimi. Usually, they were able to swim to safety, but occasionally, they drowned. It seemed that my young driver was especially determined to swamp us, after our day’s shopping. I sat in the back seat, trying to imagine how to squeeze through the undersized rear window, in the likely event of down-flooding. As fate would have it, there came a loudspeaker announcement that someone had just drowned, and the news sobered my driver just enough to induce him to give up his pursuit of the ultimate Jimi Hendrix experience.  “I guess we’ll just do it next time,” he said, and I hastily agreed, “Yes, of course. Next time. Next time.”

Author: Harry Miller

I have traveled and lived in Taiwan, China, and Japan and am now a professor of Asian history and author of Southern Rain, a novel of seventeenth-century China. View all posts by Harry Miller