Without a paddle

This one is from last night.

Its early morning. I have to get up for work. A noise has woken me up, a few minutes before my alarm should go off, and I am annoyed. I hate that. It always makes me feel sleep-deprived, even though I've only lost a few minutes.

I grab my phone, and start heading down the stairs. About the middle of the stairway, the carpet is sopping wet. Water squishes up through my socks and between my toes when I step on it.

What the heck? Why are the stairs wet? I reach to step down one more, thinking I'll turn on the light, but I actually step in water, clear up past my ankle. I run back up the stairs and use the light switch at the top. The lights come on, but they're flickering. I can see that there is a body of water in the living room of our apartment. It has risen to about halfway up the stairs. Now that I see it, I realize that I can hear it, too. The sound of water lapping up against the walls is what woke me.

I shut off the light before an electrical fire starts (wondering at the miracle that it is still working at all,) immediately wake my son, whose room is closest to me, and run with him back to my room. I wake my husband, and tell him that there is a flood, and say how high it has reached. We look out the window. The water is even higher there than inside. Somehow, the windows have not broken, and the water is only coming inside slowly.

I want to panic, but if I do, my son will, too, so I fight it and cling to the calming influences of logic and problem-solving.

I start trying to figure out how we can get to the roof. The building is just basically flat, with no roof access from inside. We could got to the attic, but we'd be trapped in there. We're going to have to climb up from the window, though there is really nothing to hold onto but bricks.

I am a good climber, so I think that I'll try. We can tie a bedsheet "rope" to me, and I will take it up and find something to fasten it to at the top. Then, I can help my family up. I outline my plan to my husband.

He tells me we don't have to do that, and reaches into the closet. I figure he is going to get a rope or something, but he pulls out a huge box. Out of that, he pulls a big vinyl object that looks a lot like the old air mattress we used to take camping with us, except that the vinyl looks much thicker and tougher. Looking at the picture on the box, I realize it is an inflatable life-boat.

He begins inflating the boat. Once it starts to take shape, he ties a makeshift sheet-rope to it and hangs it out the window. I am holding the sheet, in case he drops the boat, but he doesn't.

By the time the boat is finished inflating, the water is at the top of the stairs, and the boat is resting on water outside the window. I look around the room for something to take with us to paddle the boat, but I don't find anything flat enough to be effective at all, except for a few things that have sharp edges. The picture in the box shows paddles, but there aren't any inside it.
We can't risk puncturing the boat, so we don't take anything. We tie the sheet to the dresser, climb into the boat, and then yank the sheet loose. We'll take it with us.

The boat floats past the other buildings in the apartment complex. We can't control where it is going very well. There are handles on the sides, and we figure out that if we all lean slightly to one side or the other, we can steer around debris, but we can't get the boat to speed up or slow down. I realize that even if we had taken a paddle, the water is so choppy and moving so fast that it wouldn't have been very effective.

I start to get seasick from the motion of the boat on the water, but I am at least glad we got out safely. I can see that the water is rising above the second story windows of the buildings as we are propelled toward the church across the street. Behind the church, the trees are bending and swaying in the water. I think we will use the sheet to latch onto that building if we can, to keep from running into those. Its roof is still above the water. We may even be able to climb up there and wait. We can use my phone to call for help. Until we can get to that stability, however, both of my hands are occupied with helping to control the boat, and my phone sits useless in my pocket.

Unfortunately, the water has currents I don't know about, and we are propelled "up" the street to the east. There is a lot of debris where the current coming out of our lot meets the current moving along the street, and we barely manage to avoid most of it. I try to grab at what looks like a floating piece of a kid's toy desk, a red plastic flat item that is wide enough to actually work as a paddle, even in this mess. It is too smooth, and I can't get a grip on it. It slips from my fingers, and we float away.

We float east for a short time. I can see bits of buildings sticking up. Now the water is higher than the trees. My stomach is doing flip-flops, and I am using measured breathing and hard swallowing to keep from throwing up.

We come across another change in current. This one takes us in a big half-circle, then spits us out. I almost lose the nausea battle, but don't.
Now, I can't tell what direction we are moving, because there aren't a lot of  landmarks, and I don't recognize anything I can see.

The sun is coming up, and upon seeing the edge of it, I am able to determine that we are heading in a northern direction. The sky is not excessively cloudy, and it's not raining. I begin to wonder where all of this water came from.

Seasickness has made me dizzy. I continue to fight to keep from throwing up, because I am needed to help encourage (we aren't really steering) the boat to avoid floating debris. I feel like if we just keep going, eventually we'll reach higher ground, which is on all sides of where we live. From there, we can find our way to family.

When I woke from this, I still felt seasick . I was laying on my back again. My stomach was sick, and I was dizzy. I rolled over on my side and went back to sleep. Later, when I got up, I felt fine.
I wonder if this dream is my subconscious reaction to the economic turmoil in my area. There have been major job losses, and I am off of work right now with an injury I suffered there. My husband is working, but his income is not enough to totally support our family, and we're going to have to do some careful financial maneuvering to avoid eviction while my employer gives me the runaround about coming back to work, and about my worker's compensation case. I am worried, but I have faith in my hubby, who always seems to come up with the most unexpected solutions when there is a problem. Just as in the dream, what he is doing doesn't seem like the best thing at the time, but in the end, things turn out better for it.