Earthquake

I'm jolted awake because the bed is shaking like someone is bouncing on it. Right after I wake up, it stops shaking. My husband sits up and asks if I'm ok. Still groggy, I ask what's wrong, and he tells me he thinks I've had a seizure, that I was moving so violently that I shook the whole bed. I tell him that I didn't have a seizure. Nothing hurts, and I don't feel as though I've exerted myself in any way. I was asleep. I woke because I felt the bed shaking.

I look at him, and he looks at me. We simultaneously become worried that someone is in the room with us and has awakened us by shaking the bed. I grab my cell phone and open it, lighting up enough for us to see. He gets up and checks out the closet while I turn on the lamp. No one is there, and the door is still closed. It's too noisy to not wake us if it opens. The building is old, and door doesn't hang right, so it actually is hard to open and close.

Right when we realize no one is there but us, the whole room shakes, harder than the bed had shaken before. The shaking only lasts for a few seconds, but it's hard enough that downstairs, we hear something fall. Our son's shout comes from his room, asking what's going on. We fight with the door to get out. Normally, the trick is to push down and then pull it open, but that's really hard to do when you're being tossed around by a floor that's bucking like an angry bull.

A second or two after my husband grabs the handle, the shaking stops. Now, I feel like I've got whiplash, but in my lower back, from trying to move around while the building was shaking so hard. My husband opens the door and we run down the hall to my son's room, where he is sitting up in bed. All of the stuff has fallen off of his dresser onto the floor. He looks confused and a little scared. I tell him it's ok but that we need to get downstairs. I look out the window, and see people gathering in the parking lot outside. Someone's car alarm is going off. I feel like it's really, really important that we get out of the building. It's kind of old. I'll feel better if we can just get downstairs.

My son stands up and we turn to go down the stairs. There is a loud boom, like thunder, but without lightning and without the initial high-pitched cracking noise. Everything begins to pitch and shake again, even harder than before. Trying to keep myself steady hurts as though I'm trying to bend over backwards. My son is holding on to the bedpost for dear life. My husband has fallen, but he landed on the spare mattress that my son uses for sleepovers. The odd thought goes through my head that the mattress should have been put away, like that's really important right now.
I try to hold onto the wall, but instead, it smacks into me like I've fallen on it.

This is where I woke up for real, with back pain so bad that at first I couldn't move. I had rolled over onto my back in the night, an absolute no-no that always causes the muscles in my lower back to stiffen up and get sore. Though it was only about 5:00 A.M., there was no way I was getting any more sleep tonight. I got up, went down the stairs, and had breakfast, coffee, and Ibuprofen. Once that started working, I did some work in the kitchen, because moving around would help loosen up those sore muscles. I got a lot done before it was time to take my second dose. I'm still hurting, but it's not nearly as bad. 

It wasn't until after 11:00 A.M. that I read about the 7.1 quake that hit Alaska early this morning. It occurred to me that maybe I felt it in the night, but there's no way. I'm in Ohio, for crying out loud! For me to feel the shaking from anywhere in Alaska, that would have to be one hell of a quake! Even if I had felt it, I think there was at least an hour difference between the time of the quake and the time of the dream.

Funny coincidence, though... and I do believe it was a coincidence, even if you believe in psychic stuff, because I don't even know anyone in Alaska and have no connection whatsoever to the area. I'm sure the back pain mostly caused the nightmare. I'm more afraid of earthquakes than any other natural phenomenon, and when I have fibromyalgia related muscle pain, I usually dream that something scary is happening that's making my body hurt. This is the worst I've felt from sleeping on my back in years. It was probably also partly caused by how many quakes have been making the news lately, and probably partly because I've had this irrational, anxious feeling that my area is going to be hit with an bad earthquake soon, even though I live in an area that almost never has them. In my lifetime, we've had all of two short, low-scale quakes that didn't even do any serious structural damage, and the logical side of me says that - duh! - I have nothing to worry about. 
Still, I've been unable to shake (pun intended) that feeling ever since the Japan quake a few months ago. It's like I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop. I guess that's part of the fun of being me. I guess that's better than having an irrational fear of something mundane that I have to deal with every day. That would really suck.

I'll probably still have nightmares about it, regardless, especially if I keep reading headlines about earthquakes in the news. I suppose if that happens, I can treat those dreams like practice runs. They've got to be good for something, or they'll drive me nuts. (Yeah, I know... short trip!)