It's a Gas, Gas, Gas

I'm driving my son to school. I'm thinking about the morning's schedule, and also about his ridiculous homework assignment for the week .

This morning, I have to drop him off, go home, throw my work clothes on, and leave so I can get to work in half an hour, because I am actually starting my shift on the half hour, something no one ever does at my workplace. I know my boss did it to screw with me, though, so I didn't say anything to her, but just took it in stride. That I am not upset about it will totally piss her off.

The homework assignment, though... that has me upset. My son is assigned to watch a political movie that we can't find online, the library doesn't have, and the video store in our neighborhood has to order out. It's a fictional story called, "Having My Own." Also, the summaries and lesson plans about the movie which I just got done reading online have me up in arms about it. It looks like the school is trying to indoctrinate the kids with the idea that having personal possessions is morally wrong, and they should instead consider everything to be public domain, including their own lives. I'm going to have to go talk to the teacher about the movie before class, then drive home and get ready. That is going to leave me 5 minutes to get ready before I have to go to work, but I've gotten ready in 5 minutes before.

As we near the corner where we make our first turn, there is a thunderous boom, as if someone set off a dud firecracker. Immediately after that is a rumbling sound accompanied by major shaking of the ground. I actually watch the road in front of me ripple like waves in water. The pavement cracks up and chunks of it disappear into the ground. Instinctively, I put the van in park as the bumps and jolts jostle us all over the place. Then, I grab my son's hand. His eyes are as wide as they can get. I can tell he's shocked and horrified. I'm pretty sure the expression on my face isn't helping. I'm terrified of earthquakes.

There is nothing we can do. We're shaking too hard to have any kind of controlled movement, and we don't have any idea what is going to happen. There isn't some shelter to go to where we can get away from the earthquake, like you can with a tornado.

The shaking makes it hard to hold onto my son's hand, but I do not let go. I tell him to just hang on, that it will stop soon. Behind me, there is a crashing sound, and I turn my head to look . The house on the corner has fallen into a hole in the ground that was not there before. It looks like the house in the movie Poltergeist, crumpling up and getting sucked into a void at the end, except that it stopped at the crumpling up stage. God, I hop no one was home!

There is a crack coming from the hole. It's not headed toward us, but I throw the van into drive and try to move it forward anyway. I have to let go of my son to do that. I don't want to, but I need both hands to drive, and I need to get us away from that hole.

We move forward a couple of yards, but the shaking makes it really hard to steer. We get thrown to the side. I feel the whole van come up off of the pavement as the ground launches us upward. Then, we slam back down with two tires up on the curb. I keep driving. I can see in the rear-view mirror that the crack has completely crossed the street behind us, and it's getting wider. Traffic that was back there is making u-turns and driving the other way to escape it. The other side of the crack is also lower than our side. All I can see of the cars is the top of the windows and the roof of each as it turns. The city bus is taller. I can see the driver's frightened, determined face as he turns the bus around, running over the curb in the process.

In that split second I took to glance in the rearview mirror, another crack has opened in the pavement in front of us, this one along the center of the lane I'm in. I barely manage to steer around it before moving on, but it keeps opening and remains parallel to us. I drive over the curb and through the yard of the house on the next corner, onto a side street. As I do, I see smoke coming from the crack, and there is another boom. Something inside tells me this isn't an ordinary Earthquake.

I punch the pedal and drive through the neighborhood, speeding away from the shaking ground. The further away I get, the less shaking there is, until finally we stop in a location where we can feel the car shimmying, but the ground beneath us isn't bucking and rolling any more. I look back, and there are huge, billowing clouds of smoke behind us, coming from the direction of the gas station/convenience store where I work . There is a third boom, this one sounding almost cartoonish, and now I can see flames. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice the clock . It is not yet time for the school to even open its doors. The entire experience so far has taken all of two minutes.

People are coming out of their houses. A man in pajama pants, a bathrobe (but no shirt), and slippers approaches my car. I roll down the window and tell him how and why we ended up in his neighborhood. He says, "You don't know what's going on, do you?" and I answer "no, but I think there is a fire."

He tells me that the gas stations are blowing up. First (my station), then (the station across the street), and it sounds like now (the station on the opposite corner) just blew too. The first explosion took out a natural gas line, and they're worried about (the three gas stations down the street) going up next. The fire from (my station) has spread to (the neighboring business) and is starting to ignite the houses in the neighborhood. They've all ready called every fire station in the metro area to fight the fire.

My son says "What about our apartment? Can the fire reach that far?"

I tell him we can't worry about that right now. We're alive, and we're safe, and that's all that matters. I say that if that many firefighters show up, they will probably be able to contain the fire. They aren't going to let it spread, because it's too close to the military base. The soldiers will probably be called to help fight it. In my mind, though, I am thinking I may be wrong. A fire like that could spread quickly through the neighborhood, and they may have their hands full just trying to keep it away from the base. I can tell my son has his doubts, too. It's all over his face.

I remind him that at least none of us are caught in the fire. We're safe, and we (and his father, who is at work) can get further away whenever we want.

The man's wife comes outside with a portable radio. I can hear the DJ saying that my son's school is canceled for the day due to risk of the fire spreading, and for one stupid second I panic about having to call off work ... then I remember I don't have work because my workplace has exploded.

Oh, my God. My work place has exploded. There was probably no warning, either. My co-workers are probably dead. It's Monday. I think about who was there, and realize that if they didn't get away before the explosion, the two totally single moms I work with are both dead. Who is going to take care of their children?

The hitting home of the thought must show on my face, because the guy asks me if I am ok . I look at him, and tell him that I work at (my station.) Then it hits my son. He looks at me and says, "You could have been there." I can see the horror rising in his demeanor, and I try to calm him down, but the tears hit anyway.

At the same time, the man turns to his wife, and says, "She works there. She's one of them." I don't know what he means, but his expression suddenly hardens into deadly seriousness. He reaches into the van, as if to grab my shirt. I shove his arm back out, throw the van into drive, and speed away. The man actually chases me for several yards before giving up. I can see him pull a cell phone out of the pocket of his robe and start dialing. I turn the corner and pull out onto the main road, driving away from the neighborhood.

I call my husband's number and leave him a voicemail stating that no matter what, he is not to go home until he hears from me, that I don't know what's going on, but (my station) just blew up and a neighbor just called me "one of them" and tried to grab me. I call my parents and tell them about the incident, and that my son and I are headed their way. I call the hub of my social group, with whom I've been hanging out since college. I tell her what I've witnessed, and advise her to get her family, all of their meds, and their important papers (things she can grab quickly) out of the house and out of the neighborhood NOW. Before hanging up, I tell her about what the man said, and that I don't know what is happening, but something is very wrong. I tell her where I am going, that my son is with me and my husband is not, and ask that after she has her family to safety, she check on him. She agrees. She tells me she is glad to hear from me and know that I was not at work .

I call another very close friend, also a hub of another social circle that kind of overlaps with the first one, and go through the same discussion, though she lives a few miles away from the neighborhood, while my first phone call lives close to me.

I call my husband's mom and leave a message letting her know that we are all ok, and none of us were in the fire.

Looking at the clock, I can see that only another two minutes has passed. We have to pull over into a parking lot to let emergency crews drive past us toward the fire. They are coming down both sides of the divided road... during rush "hour" (which lasts half of the day in our neighborhood). I take a moment to once again try to calm my son, reminding him that we're safe, I wasn't in the fire, and the important thing now is to stay levelheaded and deal with the situation as it is. He looks shaky and teary-eyed, but he nods and says ok . He asks if we're going to Grandma's, and I say yes. He asks why the man called me "one of them" and I admit I have no idea, but that it bothers me enough that we're getting out of town until we find out. Then, the emergency crew is past, and we get back on the road.

We start driving. We are away from the fire, and from the nearby gas stations, heading out of town. Behind us, I hear a succession of small explosions, and a whooshing sound. It occurs to me that this is probably a natural gas explosion. At the same time, the whooshing sound gets really loud, and something slams into us from behind. Our van is picked up and thrown forward. We land on the flat bed of a semi that is in front of us, as if it were transporting us. The semi is still moving. It swerves, and we go flying sideways off of it and onto the grass. The whole time, I'm still trying to steer. When we land, I stomp the pedal to the floor and drive back up onto the road, passing several crashed vehicles until I find an open space. I can feel that there is damage to the van, but I keep driving. There is one more popping boom behind us. I hope my friend has gotten her family out of the house.

I grab my phone and dial my husband's number again. This time, he's on break and he answers. I tell him what has happened. I tell him to leave work and get out of town. I tell him a place where I'll meet him outside of the metro area. I tell him he needs to let our friend know he is all right, because she's going to check on him if he doesn't. I start to tell him I've called his mom, when there is another explosion behind us. This time, I think it may be someone's car blowing up. My husband hears the sound come across the phone, and he asks what is happening.

This is where I woke. At the same moment, I had a feeling of relief that stuff was not blowing up at his location. 

In real life, my son has had no such ridiculous school assignment. So far as I know, there is no such movie, either. Homework assignments are sometimes made which require last minute acquisition of materials which are a challenge for us to get, and that does frustrate me.

I have not recently been scheduled to go to work on the half hour, and probably won't, but it's not that odd for it to happen, and it used to be a regular thing. The three gas stations on the same corner are real, and so is one down the street that I dreamed about, but it's a mile or more away, not that close. The rest of the stations were just part of the dream.

If something like that happened, it would take longer than two minutes for the news to pick it up and start reporting on it, and if we landed on and slid off of a flatbed semi like that in my big old van, we'd probably roll. 

About half an hour after I got up this morning, there was thunder and rain. I'm wondering if there was thunder in the night. Maybe the sound of that inspired the dream. On the other hand, it could be that I've dreamed this because of the upheaval in my life. 

There is a lot of stress right now related to work, family, distance, and pressure my son is dealing with at school. In real life, my boss is kind of gaslighting me. What she doesn't realize is that I know it's happening. I've noticed that my lack of response to it is really pissing her off, and I'm kind of having fun with that. In the meantime, though, she is being rotten in other ways I'm going to get into here.

I think the detail about the homework was inspired by some real life stuff that is happening there. There is an undercurrent of political agenda, (mostly union related) but nothing I can directly confront, and I do find it threatening and annoying. However, I am able to discuss school reality versus real life reality with my son, and help him to come to rational, logical conclusions about what he is seeing and hearing there.


Anyway, I must have tensed up in response to the shaking... I feel like I had a workout last night, and possibly like I have a mild case of whiplash. Darned fibromyalgia! 

Faces in the night

Sometimes my sleep is just restless for no apparent reason, and I have a kind of nightmare that doesn't go anywhere. Instead, I briefly see huge, still images in the dark, experience short, scary scenes, and am awakened by loud phantom noises. 

The noises are often loud banging noises, as if someone is rapidly knocking on the side of my dresser really hard. Other times, I hear a panicked voice screaming something over and over, usually a protest of some kind but sometimes my name. Sometimes, instead, it's some kind of hysterical rambling in which the speech is too fast for me to understand most of the words. Once in a while, I hear a loud boom, like a bomb has gone off, or it'll be the sound of metal crashing into metal and glass breaking. That one I can identify as a remnant of a past trauma - as a child, I was in a car accident with my Mom. She was severely injured, and almost died in the car while we were waiting for the EMS to arrive.


The still images can be anything from a scary face or monster to strange landscapes. They are only there for a few seconds before I am on to the next thing, or awake, depending on how startling the image is. One recurring image is a huge reddish monster face with horrible, pointy teeth. It often appears closer to my feet, and if I wake from seeing it, I usually also jerk my knees up to my chest as I wake.
Another is the face of a long-dead relative (who I never met - this is a face from a photo) seen just by itself, as tall as a person, right next to my bed, and looking horribly angry. From the stories I've heard, she was psychotic and extremely abusive of others.


The short scenes are worse. Those usually involve something coming after me, something trying to bite and/or eat me, or something doing something terrible to someone I know. These are always over from start to finish before I get a chance to respond. 

Usually, they wake me up, and most of the time, they're accompanied by one of those loud noises. There are a few that are recurring scenes or themes. One, I've come to think of as looming faces. 

These are usually scary human or monster faces that come at me out of the dark. Sometimes that wakes me. If not, I usually get bitten. Often, the faces are making noises, ranging from an odd whine or growl to nonsense syllables. 

One that happens a lot is a rapid, repeating "Na-na-na" that gets louder as the face gets closer to me. It's spoken in a sharp tone, as an adult would do with "no-no-no" to a little kid about to hurt herself on something she's not supposed to touch.


Another is faces that change after they appear, seeming to melt, or go through rapid color changes. Sometimes they turn into other faces, from human to monster, or from monster to nastier monster. 

The weirdest short scene dream, a rare one that really messes up the rest of my night, is the blasting dream. It starts with this huge booming sound like thunder, close by but not right next to me. Immediately following the boom, everything in my sight is ripped apart and starts flying toward me. That includes people if the scene includes any. As everything gets close to me, I see smoke and sometimes flames behind the flying debris. 

I wake when the blast hits me. It always feel like when you accidentally belly-flop into a pool, and all of your skin smacks at once, except this is a hundred times worse. When I wake up, my skin where the nerves went off in response to the dream always feels tight and sore, like after a sunburn, for several minutes, as if I really did smack into a pool of water.


I think these dreams are a product of high levels of stress, and sometimes of other normal causes of sleep disturbances (like noises outside, illness, or pain from fibromyalgia) because the pattern of them happening seems to follow times when those factors are in play.

Tentacle Monster

One of the denizens of my nightmare world, I believe, is my mind's response to my body's physical pain. I suffer from chronic, widespread, unexplained pain. I've been diagnosed with Fibromyalgia. There are things I am able to do to reduce that pain, but sometimes, in the depths of sleep, I end up letting my body fall into a position that makes it worse. If I roll onto my back, my lumbar area seizes up and the muscles across that area get sore. If I don't wake up right away, that moves around to my belly and lower ribs. Then, I dream about the tentacle monster.

I never seem to be able to see the monster itself. Its physical impression is more of a warping of the light that comes from sources on the other side of it. However, I do get a definite sense of how it looks. Its main body is a solid but soft, fleshy, slim core. It's almost kind of cylindrical, but it's rounded and puffy at the top and bottom, like a half-deflated souffle, or a jellyfish.

Like a jellyfish, it has a multitude of long, soft, fleshy tentacles. These seem to be attached to the top and bottom. Some of the ones on the bottom are shorter and more solid, though it's tough to say if there are bones. Those, it uses to propel itself about. The others seem to range from around a foot to around four feet long, at about an inch to two inches thick. These, it uses to prod and, I can only guess, feed. Its attack involves initially searching with those longer tentacles, until it finds something solid. Then, it pushes, wraps, and squeezes.

I can feel the tentacles wrapping around my waist and my ribs. Wherever it touches, it gives little jolts of electricity. This feels almost like being tickled, except that it is really, really painful.

It pulls me in toward that solid center. As bad as the pain is from the tentacles, I'm really afraid of what will happen if I can't escape.

I fight by grabbing at the tentacles, squeezing and pulling them apart. It hurts my hands to be zapped by them, but if I don't fight, this thing will devour me.
When I start hurting it, I am hit by the sensation of of something pushing against the top of my head, but it pushes beyond the skin and into the inside. It makes me feel drugged, with that heavy-headed sensation that happens as a side effect with some pain medicines. I know that is a defense of the monster's, and that I am injuring it, so I continue to attack the tentacles. I can feel them pressing into the flesh in my back, breaking through the skin. The pain is excruciating.

The battle continues this way, with more tentacles wrapping around me as I tear apart the ones that are all ready there. The longer we fight, the more covered in tentacles I become, until I can barely breathe. It is a losing battle every time, lasting until the pain becomes too severe for me to take.

When I awaken, I always feel like I lost, and something was taken from me, but the real pain is never as bad as the pain from the dream. I don't know if that last bit is because when awake, my brain masks pain I all ready know I have, so that I can pay attention to my surroundings and activity, or if it is because when asleep, my subconscious multiplies the pain in the dream because of the nightmare setting. Either way, a change of position alleviates some of it, and if I go back to sleep, it will fade further throughout the night. Only rarely do I ever have that dream a second time in the same night.

When I was a kid, though, I used to sleepwalk.. I would dream of fighting this thing in my room, and I'd hide under my desk to limit the directions from which tentacles could attack and the number that could get to me. I would bite, scratch, kick, grab, punch, anything. Every time I had that dream, when I woke up, I really would be under that desk.. I know that scientists say that sleepwalking does not take place during the dream state, but in my case, either it occurred in response to the dream, or the other way around, because the two went together more often than not.