What Colour Are Your Spaceships?

As we all know by now, I guess, the world singularly failed to end on 21 May, 2011. Most people were glad.

I think Mr Harold Camping, the California engineer who started the rumour, was probably disappointed. I'm sure he'll come up with a new calculation soon. All we can do is wish him better luck next time, and recommend that he remember to carry the ones. Of course, if he ever gets in touch with the German Phantom Time theorists, we'll never hear the end of it.

I first consulted with seers on the subject of the eschaton back in the mid-70s. It was a heady time, when people seriously considered the famous saying:

And it shall come to pass afterward, [that] I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.– Joel 2:28

The fact that a lot of the young men seeing visions were doing so because they didn't pay attention when their mothers warned them about picking up toadstools is another issue. Far out, man.


Be that as it may, on a sunny afternoon in the early summer of 1975, I happened to be having coffee with some friends, when elderly Frau Diesendoerfer buttonholed me to describe her latest prophetic dream. (Apparently, the Almighty was more gender-inclusive than the King James Version let on.)

'I was standing in the square in Bonn,' she informed me, 'and there, above the Rathaus, was a huge clock. No, not on the Rathaus, above it, in the sky.' She leaned forward confidentially. 'The clock stood at five minutes to twelve. That shows how close we are to The End.'

I nodded respectfully, although Frau Diesendoerfer was distracting me from what my other friends were saying. Gisela Tischbein – the Post Office trainee whose father I've already written about was planning to marry Guenther Hoeppner, a young plumber whose parents came to Bonn as refugees from East Prussia at the end of the war. I liked the couple, and Guenther's mother, who was a hard-working widow lady. What I was trying to overhear was Frau Hoeppner's conversation with her future daughter-in-law, because I suspected Gisela of planning mischief.

Gisela had a naughty sense of humour, and Frau Hoeppner, a motherly sort of woman who was nonetheless extremely devout, was trying her best to make sure the wedding came off in an atmosphere of East Prussian Baptist purity. I'd just overheard her pointing out to the young folk that, although their civil marriage took place next Saturday, they weren't really married until the church wedding could be held. 'Civil ceremonies don't count,' she was insisting. I knew that Guenther and Gisela were 'saving themselves', so that wasn't the joke for me. I just wanted to know what Gisela was going to say next.

After all, she'd already spoiled The Talk Frau Hoeppner had been trying to have for weeks – Gisela's mother had passed on, and Frau Hoeppner wanted to make sure Gisela had The Facts. But Gisela, who knew exactly what her future mother-in-law was getting at, kept changing the subject – a process made easier by Frau Hoeppner's desperate choice of nervous metaphors.

Frau Hoeppner wanted to talk about 'intercourse', you see. Or 'sexual congress'. But she couldn't bring herself to say the word 'sexual'. (After more than twenty years' experience with my own mother, I sympathized. My mother once told my sister she couldn't wear a skirt with no braces until she had 'a dip-in in the middle'. For some reason, she choked on the notion of a 'waist'.) Now, the German word for 'congress' is the same as the word for 'traffic'. So Gisela had pretended on more than one occasion to be concerned about the cars outside. Frau Hoeppner had given up in despair.

Notwithstanding my keen interest in the wedding preparations, my ears pricked up when Frau Diesendoerfer told me about the clock. Her description of the dream took me back more than a year, to another conversation I'd had – also with a casual acquaintance, also an elderly person, also about the possibility of…well, stuff that Harold Camping and Herbert W Armstrong wanted to know about.

It was the last Christmas of my undergraduate years. I'd been called in at the last minute by the church choir director – it was two days before the annual Christmas cantata (Love Transcending, by John W. Peterson, aren't you glad you asked?), and the pianist was down with the 'flu, and they knew I knew the music, so could I please come up to the north of Pittsburgh and crash a few chords? They promised transportation and some (non-alcoholic) punch afterwards. Of course, I said. Have fingers, will travel.

It was at the reception, over cookies with sprinkles and punch containing nothing more exciting than rainbow sherbet, that I met Mr Hunnicutt. Mr Hunnicutt, a genial little man with a broad grin and a bald pate, was up visiting from Georgia. He'd had a dream, as well. About angels.

He leaned forward confidentially. 'It's spaceships,' he explained. 'They were flying golden spaceships.' I agreed that this was a wonderful dream and a blessing (much more so than the punch). I wish I could have got those two together – Mr Hunnicutt and Frau Diesendoerfer. They had the same vision of the world, although they didn't speak one another's language. Maybe they can compare notes when the spaceships come.

So what have we learned, Mr Camping? Don't count your earthquakes before they're hatched? I would add: a dream is a fine thing. Share it with a friend. Keep it and enjoy it. Bask in the glow of what you know, or think you know. But don't put it on a billboard.

I still like the idea of golden spaceships, though. A lot. No matter what colour yours are – and where you think they're coming from – may they glide through your dreams, bringing inspiration. After all, if you don't dream things that aren't, and say 'Why not?', what are you doing besides waiting for your own personal apocalypse, whatever Saturday it arrives on? Better to look to the skies.