Ever since I started listening to air traffic control to fall asleep (via the LiveATC app on my phone) instead of NPR or something, all my dreams have involved air travel in some sense. 

Last night I had a dream about having to fly on a particularly repugnant (fictional) airline because they were some amount cheaper than my usual favorites. I can’t remember the name of it but it was particularly insidious. This airline’s selling point (which made the experience so distasteful to me) was its attempt to appeal to hardcore social conservatives. The on-board experience was marketed as an exercise in propriety from the American heartland. The aircraft was clearly painted to resemble Air Force One (same shade of blue). A passenger was escorted off the plane before takeoff for being overly flamboyant (i.e. gay). I didn’t see a single ethnic minority represented onboard. I was criticized by the older, bespectacled lady sitting to my left for eating the bread roll in the inflight meal with my hands rather than cutting it up with the provided plastic knife. I don’t specifically remember there being a prayer before takeoff to thank God for the miracle of flight and ask for safe passage, but there might as well have been. The management at SFO was so disgusted by this airline’s existence that they refused to give them jetway access, forcing passengers to walk across to the far corner of the tarmac (where this airline was made to park out of sight, out of mind) in the rain to get on board.

Usually my dreams make absolutely no sense and I forget them shortly after I wake up, but this one stayed with me in vivid detail until now, so I figured I’d better write it down.