"The Ship of Dreams"

Synopsis: After experiencing over a week of a strange, increasingly vivid, reoccurring dream involving a little girl crying out for a toy, Marty goes to Doc Brown for some help and advice. Doc decides to try out a fairly new creation of his out on Marty--a device that is able to interpret brain waves into words and, in short, record dreams in a written format. After a few false starts, the device works and both Doc and Marty, along with an enthusiastic Jennifer, discover that Marty's dreams are about an incident with a relative of his aboard the Titanic on the night it sunk. But when this discovery fails to end the dreams--and, in fact, increases them--Doc reluctantly agrees to a trip back to the Titanic that fatal night to fix what apparently went wrong and hopefully end the dreams. But despite all the precautions taken to not change history and to keep them from accidentally being a part of it, something goes terribly wrong when a new addition to the DeLorean works a little too well. Are Marty, Doc, and Jennifer now stranded on the sinking ship?

Length: Approximately 54,000 words

Written: September 1998 - February 1999

Revised: February 1999

Author's Notes: I got this idea in a really weird way--started one morning in late July '98 as I was getting dressed for my summer job. I was reflecting on some weird dream I'd had the night before and had the fleeting thought of wondering if people's eyes moved (during REM sleep, when people dream) in correspondence with what they're dreaming of. Like, say, if someone was watching a tennis game in their dream, would their eyes move back and forth as they "watched" the ball? From this question, I then had this sudden, vivid picture of Doc putting these wires on Marty's head to "record" his dreams. As I drove to work that morning, more and more of the picture trickled in. It was like I was excavating an already completed plot outline, piece by piece, in my head. Way before all that Titanic hype the past year, I had always, always wanted to write a Titanic BTTF story--but found it one of the Great Impossibles to do. Mostly, I could see no reason why Doc or Marty or anyone would voluntarily go back there--it would be not only a death sentence, but the chance of altering history by the tiniest thing could be astronomically easy! But the reasons they go back in this case would be somewhat acceptable, at least to me, who is being more finicky with character motivation as I grow older. I'd also had an interest in the Titanic since I was at least 6 years old, when they had found wreckage of the ship in 1985. I remember looking through this December 1986 issue of National Geographic Magazine at the pictures that had been taken of the Titanic remains and being utterly fascinated! (Later, the past summer, I found this same magazine and article in the library archives! Talk about deja vu....) During my high school senior year, I had wanted to do a semester project on the Titanic--but my teacher, Mr. Yambouranis, dismissed it as too "mysterious." So then I picked the topic of sleep--which, actually, helped me out tremendously in this story! My huge report, which had recieved an A+, was an excellent resource! Like Jennifer, I had read "A Night to Remember," (this past summer, 1998) and in fact found it an excellent resource for my story. The portion of the third class passenger list where Marty discovers his relatives is, in fact, from that book. There were no Baines on the list, but the other names surrounding it were there, in that order. A few sly winks towards the movie "Titanic" include the title of a book Doc and Jennifer discover in the library--look carefully at the title and author's name--and the name of Marty's great aunt, which was used in the title of a song Jack sings to Rose. There are also some other "in" jokes scattered about. I always preferred "The Ship of Dreams" title to "Out of Time." So I changed it. What the heck. It also cuts down on the repition of the word "time" in all the story titles -- even if that word is involved in the next story. The character of Peter McCoy is based on a friend of mine in surname and physical appearence only. As the character evolved, any simularities between my friend and the character's personality, history, etc went purely into the fictional realm. I never intended to have this character, by the way--it was another one of my sudden and unplanned situations that can crop up in my stories that ended up working really well. In a way, Jennifer has to grapple with similar issues Marty did in "Tremors in Time," although this situation had an added twist to it. I used many technical terms for portions of the ship in this story. Some people may know (i.e. "stern" is the back of a ship, "bow" is the front), others may be kind of "huh?" ones (i.e. "poop deck" is the deck at the back of the stern). I felt this added to the story, and it also was easier for me in the writing, as I practically needed maps and blueprints of the ship at my side to write the action on the Titanic. "Second Class enclosed prominade deck" was a lot easier to locate on the maps and in my head than merely "enclosed deck." If anyone reading this is so inclined, they can locate the Titanic blueprints and have some fun mentally retracing the character's steps and positions in the story. Dreams are funny things--sometime in January, I experienced my own little Titanic dream, probably in part due to studying books and the history of the ship before I turned in every night. I must say it wasn't very pleasant--the raw fear I was feeling in the dream over the impending fate of the ship wasn't fun at all, and it haunted me the rest of the day. I suppose it was some form of "research," however. Thus far, I have enjoyed writing this story more than any one in recent memory and have been obsessive with details to the point of actually buying several books about the Titanic--in other words, investing money! I consulted photographs, detailed recreations of the events, interviews with those on the ship, maps, you name it. The best source of my research was a really nice book that I scored at Borders for $5--and the recommended price was $30! Neat. Some of the incidents that the characters see aboard the Titanic really happened, according to my research. Rereading this story in its entirety, I was struck by a few things. One, I tended to use more ship terms as the story progressed, which is probably only natural. And two, the story moved fast--at least from my perspective. This was the first time the bulk of a story took place over 2 hours, and the writing was a little challenging because of that. Though it's two hours to the characters, it took me a good two months to write that Titanic segment, at least! So in writing, it seemed to take forever, but upon reading it went by rather quickly.

CHAPTERS 1 - 8 CHAPTERS 9 - 15