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! 

Labyrinth from hell

Another recurring dream has me with a loved one, fleeing a terrible situation, and unable to get out. It is not always the same person, but it is always the same situation, the same pattern, and the same outcome. Though I have been able to use some lucid dreaming ability (I am not very skilled at that, try as I might) to overcome some dreams like this one by altering the scenery around me to allow success in the effort involved, I have yet to achieve any level of lucidity during this scenario. Instead, my mind takes it at face value, I am trapped in the scenery presented, and the story plays itself out as it will.
We are in a building that is on fire. At first, the only evidence of it is smoke along the ceiling, coming into the room through the building's ventilation system. We know from that sign that enough of the building is burning that we cannot extinguish it. Escape is imperative.
We are in a room. It's kind of like an office, with office furniture, but it feels like this is also a place where we live. I do not like leaving everything behind. I know that things I value are going to burn. It cannot be helped. We value our lives more than we value anything in that room, even though it pains us to know our possessions will be destroyed. We don't know yet how bad the fire is, and we can't take the chance that a moment's delay could cost us our ability to get out. My companion's face mirrors my sense of heartbreak..

We go out into a long, narrow hallway. There are doors along the walls. Most of them are unmarked. We know some are locked, and some just lead to other rooms. They are not the way out. There is less smoke in the hallway, where there are fewer vents. We run past the other rooms, down to the end of the hallway. I stop my companion from opening the door. First, we have to see if it is hot. If it is, we will know that route is unsafe, and we'll have to flee to the door at the other end of the hall. We only chose this one because it was closer.

I place my hand on the surface in front of me. It's smooth, and it's cooler than my skin. I touch the handle. It feels the same. We can go this way.

Opening the door, I lead us into a stairwell. We go down a flight, turn, and go down another. There are no more stairs. The door at the bottom is cool. Opening that, I lead us into another long hallway full of doors. All of the doors in this hallway are alike.

At this point, it feels like we are in an unfamiliar building, one that we've never navigated before. We don't know which door leads to the outside, or if any of them do. We go down the hallway, testing and opening each door. None of them open to the outside, or even to a room with windows to the outside.

It is hot in here. I am starting to fear that we are closer to the fire than before. My companion suggests that the heat is moving through the ventilation system, not coming from nearby. We can see smoke blowing in through the few vents along the wall.

At the other end of the hallway, we open the door, expecting to find an exit, stairwell, or lobby, but instead, it leads into another hallway running perpendicular to the one we are in. Now, we really don't know which way to go. I think that if we go back, the door at the other end of the hallway we left might lead to the way out. We turn, and there is a lot of smoke behind us. It is so much that we can't see more than halfway down the hall. We can't go back that way. Even if the fire is not there, we wouldn't be able to breathe.

We enter the perpendicular hallway, unsure which way to turn. Both ways look the same; long and narrow, with a few doors on either side and one at the end. My companion starts walking to the right, and I follow. We try side doors, but they are all locked. One has windows into the room, but all we can see is smoke. At the end of the hall, we feel the door, and it opens on its own into another hallway, perpendicular to this one. Exchanging a look, we run to the other end. The door at that end is locked, so we go back to the hallway.

Fearing that a right turn will lead us back to the fire, since we would be headed back in the direction we had come from, we head left. Again, the side doors are locked, but the hallway has doors at both ends. We are both terrified that we will not be able to find our way out of this building. There is smoke just along the ceiling of this hallway. The door at the end is ajar. Smoke is blowing out at the top. It doesn't lead directly outside.

We look, and see another stairway. This one only goes down from here. We realize that we don't know what floor we are on, and the stairway could lead to the basement. We look behind us, and notice that the other end of this hallway is so far we can't tell what is there. Something about that direction is scary. When I think about going back that way, I get a cold, compressed feeling in the pit of my gut, and I'm sure there is something bad there. My companion agrees, and we head down the stairs.

I feel responsible for my companion's safety. If I don't make the right decisions, and we die in the fire, this person's death will be my fault. I am sure of that, and it weighs heavily on my mind. I have to find a way for us to get out.

We go down the stairs. Opening the door, we find that another hallway stretches out in front of us. My heart sinks. The only way to go is forward, but that will be backtracking, taking us in the direction we came from, even though we are now on a different floor. We feel all of the doors along the hall, for fear that we are getting closer to the fire. Most of the doors are locked, but one in the middle opens to another hallway, again perpendicular to the one we are in. It is on the right, so it would backtrack us again, taking us right under the smoke-filled hallway we had come from before. We turn to continue in the direction we were going, but we can see actually see fire that way. There isn't a lot, just enough for the flickering light to reflect off of the walls.

We go through the door we've opened, running to the first door we find. It is locked. Now, I am starting to panic. I make my companion stand back, intending to kick the door, hard. I raise my knee up to my chest, and thrust my foot into the middle of the door with as much force as I can muster, hitting with my shoe flat against the wood. I feel the shock of the impact resonate up my leg and into my back, but the door cracks. I kick it again, and it breaks. It's not enough for us to get in. A third kick knocks out a section of wood, and we can at least see through that. Looking, we see that it just leads to a room. We don't even see any windows to the outside. We continue on to the next door. It's also locked, and now we're afraid enough that we just keep moving until we find an unlocked door.

We continue the pattern of finding hallways and stairwells, some going up, some going down. We can't seem to find anything that leads out, and each time we think about going back and looking for an alternate route, there is smoke, or there are flames. The smoke around us is increasing in thickness and volume, and we find ourselves hunching over to avoid breathing too much of it in. We pull our shirts over our mouths and noses to act as filters. We are now almost fully panicked, totally unaware of which direction we are going, and unable to retrace our steps. Every hallway or stairwell we encounter appears the same as the one before.

As we continue to move, the building gets hotter. It doesn't feel like we're moving closer to the fire. It feels like the fire is simply growing, consuming the building and becoming too big to escape.

Soon, we can see the walls smoldering around us. Blackening spots are forming in the paint as we run by.

Terror grips us, and we begin opening doors without checking for heat, running forward regardless of the futility with which we are repeatedly presented on the other side of each unlocked door we find.

Flames lick their way along parts of the walls and ceiling. If the door in front of us only leads to another hallway or stairwell, we are sure we aren't going to make it out of here alive. We are holding hands, and are alternately pulling each other toward the next door at the end of yet another impossibly long hallway. The air is so hot it makes our skin feel chapped.

I usually wake at some point between when the walls begin to smolder, and when the heat from the flames begins to feel painful. On waking, my first feeling is a sense of having abandoned my companion to the fire. I have escaped the dream, and in doing so, the danger, but I could not bring the other person with me. I am slammed with a sense of guilt, and a desperate need to return to the dream and rescue my loved one. I am overwhelmed by the conviction that this person is in immediate peril, terrified, alone, and feeling abandoned and doomed. It feels like it's my fault, because I woke up before finding us an escape route, and since I am awake, I am no longer there to help. I feel as though if I don't go back, that version of that person will burn to death. I am afraid for that person, desperate to help, guilty over the abandonment and how it must make him or her feel, and ashamed of what he or she must think of me for leaving. I am left having to convince myself that because it was just a dream, the experience was all in my head, and no one really is hurt. It sometimes takes hours, and the ability to contact the person and be assured of his or her safety in the real world, before I am able to overcome the feelings of foreboding, helplessness, urgency, regret, and shame.