Disasters

Dearest Rachel –

There are a lot of ways to go that I don’t want to experience – yours, in retrospect, wasn’t so bad, being so sudden you probably didn’t see it coming until it was upon you – and last night included quite the collection of possibilities.

Most of them seemed to involve island life in some form or another – which means that I’m not likely to truly have to worry about experiencing them – and either fire or ice, which is an odd mix when they come together. Of course, one can get hail in the summer, and volcanos can erupt in the winter, so it’s not entirely beyond possibility to juxtapose these two opposing sources in a single disaster. But in fact, the first – and most terrifying, in my opinion – literally isn’t possible where I pictured it happening.

In that portion of my dream, I found myself heading downtown (so, perhaps this was South Bass, rather than our usual stay to the north on Middle Bass) to the post office to mail a letter or something – again, an odd thing to be doing in this day and age of electronic communication, but dreams have their own logic, as we both know so well. Through the buildings, I could see that the ground about a block beyond me was turning orange; not from paint or anything else so innocuous, but it was literally melting, as if it were turning into lava. And it was spreading fast, with buildings and people being swallowed up and essentially drowning in liquid rock. There was no way that I would be able to escape, even if I were to make a run for it toward the shoreline and jump in; this molten state was clearly moving faster than I would be able to run.

So, I escaped in the only way I could; I opened my eyes. That’s right, I was able to get out of the dream by realizing it was a dream, and waking myself up. Only, I hadn’t, really. It was at this point that you were by my side in bed, reassuring me that it couldn’t be true, as the Great Lakes and the islands therein were caused by glacial activity, not volcanos, and that sort of thing wouldn’t ever happen on ‘our’ islands.

All of which means that I hadn’t gotten out of the dream at all, although I can’t say I objected, especially when you basically asked me whether or not I was going to kiss you, now that we were both up and ‘awake.’ And while I was more than happy to oblige you (although you’d think I’d remember more about that kiss), I didn’t, at the time, sense anything out of the ordinary at this point, proving that I hadn’t actually mastered the art of lucid dreaming, after all.

I did, however, find myself contemplating how that had to be one awful way to die, drowning in molten lava like Gollum in the caldera of Mount Doom. Of course, I should know better – the heat involved in that (not to mention the toxic gases released by the process) would most likely kill a person long before they were physically enveloped by the magma. A disaster of this type would be more like the one at Mount Peleé a century or so ago, where virtually everyone suffocated well before the pyroclastic flow reached the town. Still, considering that I don’t relish the thought of either drowning or burning to death, the idea of a situation in which both could happen simultaneously is so far beyond frightening to me that it’s no wonder my mind would make it a nightmare within a nightmare.

Which, despite your occasional presence in the larger dream that contained my first dream, it certainly was. It was a little more disjointed, with scene cuts and the like throughout, but included my contention that a similar situation was upon us in our own little island. It was winter, but I wasn’t confident that the lake was sufficiently frozen over to allow people to get between the island and the mainland, or vice versa. At some point, a fellow handed me an envelope to deliver to his landlord (evidently, I was trusted to do that sort of thing in the little community my mind had devised), and with it, he recommended that I not talk about such things, lest people get worried and stop trying to make the trip.

It would seem that, even in dreams, people are people, and don’t want to be warned about imminent disasters.

Whether the man with the envelope made it back to the mainland safely or not, though, I couldn’t tell you. As with life itself, I get one perspective in these dreams, and it’s mine, and I certainly wasn’t about to cross that half-frozen lake myself. In any event, the scene shifted before I had a chance to find out if I had been right, because another disaster was heading our way.

Literally. We ran outside to the gasps of others congregated around, to see a ‘star’ in the sky growing brighter and bigger as it descended toward us. At some point, it seemed to veer away from the center of the sky – it was going to hit the Earth, yes, just not where we were standing. There were screams and tremors that accompanied the sound of impact, and the next thing I knew, I was pinned against the house by a number of large shards of ice from the comet that had struck us not too far away. Strangely enough, I was realizing that I couldn’t perceive anything out of my left eye, and it was only at that point that it occurred to me that one of the branches of this enormous icicle that had wedged me against the outside wall had penetrated into my eye. In a remarkable touch of dream logic, the frozen spear had served as an ice pack, so I felt no pain from the injury, only a mild observation of the fact. And you know me well enough to know that kind of reaction to that kind of injury is so out of character as to be worthy of comment. Whether it was truly a serious injury or not, however, is rather a moot point, because that’s when I really woke up.

Now, were I a king in ancient days, this would have been a horrible portent of some imminent apocalyptic catastrophe. But since I’m nothing more than an ordinary schmo, it probably means absolutely nothing.

Still, you might want to keep an eye on me, honey, and wish me luck; I might just need it.