Looking closer at photos of the later US Navy Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruisers, I note details that suggest my dream the other night could be accurate in terms of how I see the layout of the weatherdeck next to the helicopter landing deck.
In my artificial memory, I have never even stepped foot on any ship in that class. The closest observation I have in my mind was one day when we were deployed to the Med on the USS Wainwright CG 28 and we were arriving in Rota Spain near Gibraltar and either the Ticonderoga itself or one other early ships of that class was already in port and I was impressed to see that ship, which I remember featured the missile rail launchers instead of the later VLS system. That is the only actual "memory" I have of ever seeing a ship of that class. I don't think I had ever even seen close by an Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer until I saw the Momsen anchored nearby on 3 March 2006 in that park where I had been going to sit.
So in the dream of the Ticonderoga, there was a lot of details I still remember from the dream but the interesting part is that I was in a secluded area on the weatherdecks looking up I could see the helicopter landing deck and there was a small arms range target still in place on the edge of the deck above me and it had a very large hole in the center as though it had been hit by a lot of bullets. Looking at the image on a later Ticonderoga class ship I can see that such a sight is possible when standing on the weatherdecks. I was on the starboard side and I seemed to be near the aft end of the helicopter deck, which was inside and above me, and there was something someone said about how I was in officer's country, as though that area had been set aside as an area of seclusion for officer's as though they were sitting in deck chairs on a leisure cruise ship.
Nearby was a hatch that I went through and there was a very long stairwell that was not one long stairwell but that was closer to a stairwell you would see in a building but it was not as consistent in how it twisted around and the stairwell in the dream made seemingly random switchbacks. I see such stairwells in my dreams a lot. In this case, if I had written about this dream several years ago, I would have written that it was a foreign dream and that the narrator told me not to go all the way down the bottom and I did not, although I seemed to know the lower deck where the stairwell would end. There was a sink at one of the levels of the stairwell as it switched back and I washed my hands which is something I can never recall doing in a dream.
