I have several recurring dreams. In one of them, I am on the ground, and for some reason I look up in the sky to see a plane in trouble. In my dream, I seem to be the first person on the ground to have noticed this, and I watch the plane come down from some height as horror grips me. And in my dream, if I finish it, the plane invariably goes all the way down — not all that far from me.

I am sure an interpreter of dreams can have a field day with that.

The dream has one slight variation: Sometimes the plane crashes into a sports stadium.

A version of this happened tonight at the game I attended here in the UAE.

Al Ain, leaders of the top-flight Pro League soccer division, against Al Wahda of Abu Dhabi. Probably the biggest rivalry in the country.

I was assigned to cover it for The National, and rented a car for the 100-mile drive in each direction. I had plans to be there at 7, but it always takes longer to get to Al Ain than I hope, in part because you are required to drive so slowly after you hit the edge of the town — which is a long way from the football stadium, right on the border with Oman.

Hence, I got to the stadium closer to 7:30, and I missed the crash of a one-man paraglider into the packed stands on the Al Ain side of the field, which occurred at about 7.

Let me back up a minute. I also have had this idea — not a dream; actually thought about it — that I would be covering a game somewhere in my career and some disaster would occur, and I would go from sports to news reporter and do a bang-up job.

Something like this happened early in my career, when a plane crashed in the old Baltimore stadium shortly after an NFL game, and some sports reporters there wrote about it, as I recall.

Something more violent happened at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, when I was one of a handful of editors still in the Gannett News Service offices at the time of the Centennial Olympic Park bombing, in which two people died. I wrote some of the early stories for the wire, despite not physically going to the park, a few blocks away.

Not that I wanted any of this to happen. It’s bad stuff dumped on people at sports events, and that shouldn’t happen. Also, turns out I hate to be distracted in any way from covering the game in front of me.

But, yes, the idea of a disaster at a sports venue and me being there … this thought was bubbling in my subconscious.

So, I was trying to find my way to the press box of the stadium, which had some new and complicated systems for access, presumably because of the big rivalry game, and I noticed an ambulance parked out front of the VIP entrance. The light was going on top, and I figured someone might have had a heart attack. Big crowd, and all. Something could happen.

When I got to the media area, a colleague from a rival newspaper mentioned that a “helicopter,” I think he called it, had crashed into the stands at about 7, and that the empty section (10-15 seats across, maybe 15 rows deep) across the way was where it had happened. Fans there had been moved.

He hadn’t actually seen it, either.

First thing I did was text one of the main officials of the home team, and I followed that with a call to the same number. I actually expected him to get back to me. The vibe in the stadium was celebratory and anticipatory, and it was difficult to believe that anything serious had happened. I figured we would have this straightened out quickly. It wasn’t clear that anyone was hurt.

So, game gets closer, and that’s when I saw a tweet from a fan of another UAE team in which he suggested four were hurt. This was much more serious, if unproven.

But it was almost kickoff. I decided that this needed to be checked into — but I was not the guy to do it, because those injured presumably were receiving medical care at a hospital, not at the stadium. The “injuries” part had left my field of view.

I called Leah, who works on the news side, and asked her to relay the basics of what I knew to the news desk. (She was already out of the office. And she did so.) That was a good call, because the night reporter began chasing the story and came up with the story linked (above). But I should have gone one more key step further — by talking to fans not far from me to ask them what they had seen.

This literally never occurred to me, and my explanations for that are that I was 1) watching the game and 2) tweeting about it and 3) I had turned it over to news (end of story), plus I was about to get some comment from the high team official. (Who, of course, never contacted me.)

My other explanation (not an excuse), was the lack of any sense of “something bad just happened here” in the stadium. Something weird had happened, but was it “really bad,” too?

The game went off on time. No one was in a bad mood. The fans were very animated. And after the game, no reporters asked about it, the coaches said nothing of it. It was like it hadn’t happened — and, too, it was over and done with before I got into the stadium.

What happened, apparently, was this: One of two paragliders (part of pre-match entertainment) flew too low and got his little propeller caught up in lines holding up big balloons, and fell into the crowd. The pilot and around eight guys on the ground were hurt. Fans in the area where the glider fell were agitated, and many scattered, and the authorities kept that area of the stands empty all night, and seemed to be doing the start of an investigation into evidence on the ground, during the match.

Anyway, our night reporter came up with the basics, and our sister newspaper, the Arabic-language Al Ittihad, got some good art (better than it appears on the web site) and I believe we had the only story of consequence in the morning print product, as well as online for many hours.

I should have been able to offer some eyewitness accounts, too, but as noted, I didn’t think of that. I was too busy watching a fairly wretched game.

Al Ain won, 1-0. I can tell you that for certain.

So, this crashing plane I keep dreaming about … I hope even more that it doesn’t happen in real life, because I’m not at all sure I would be very good at covering it as a news event. I’d probably keep on driving to the game I was scheduled to see rather then stop and check out the wreck — or tell anyone about watching the plane falter and fall.

Update: The second-day story has the pilot and eight fans on the ground hurt. The only serious were those to the pilot, who may have a broken leg and pelvis.