Having a blast. Wish you were here.

I sit up, moving so suddenly and quickly that I startle my caregivers. I'm yelling at them, "What the hell! Let me go!"
I try to stand, but there's something wrapped around me, holding me down.

The nurse runs across the room, rapidly telling me to calm down, that it's all right, and she'll undo the strap. She explains that they had to do something. I was walking in my sleep.

Walking in my sleep? I haven't done that in years. I'm stunned into momentary inaction, sitting up in the hospital bed, looking at the nurse like she's grown a second head. As I sit there, everything starts coming back to me; my relationship with the gray haired woman, the terrible things we've been through, and what the creepy guy has done to her. I can feel a bruise on my arm from the shot I was given. The nurse sees the expressions crossing my face as the memory plays through my head, and pauses in her approach, and gives me a wary look.

She says, "Are you in control, or are you going to be a problem?"

Her hand is on her pocket. The shape is too big for a syringe. I think she may be holding a taser.

I struggle for a moment, as the weight of my outrage at what I've learned tries to overpower my hold on logic and reason. I can't fight him this way. This is what he feeds on. He'd just use it to turn me against myself. He'd destroy everything we've fought for. I may not understand much of what is going on, but I understand that.

I can't be not angry. It's too much. I can't know what he is and what he's done without having an emotional response to that knowledge. It would be stupid to try to deny that. I just have to not be controlled by how angry I am. I can be angry and reasonable at the same time. I have to, or we're lost.

I can feel energy building up around me. I've been unconsciously pulling. I'm inside of something that looks kind of like a flame. I gather it into myself, take a deep breath, and let it out slowly, sending the energy back where it came from. I tell the nurse I'm all right. I find the buckle on the belt, and I get up.

I'm still wearing the footie pajamas and puppy slippers. Grateful as I am for the comfort and rest, this isn't going to do. I need to be taken seriously. I take them off and stand in the middle of the room, and close my eyes. I try to clear my mind, but it's not going to happen. Meditation just isn't my thing. I can't be not angry. I just can't.

When I open my eyes, there is clothing on the couch. I meant to make it materialize all ready on me, but this is good enough. At first, it looks like there's two of everything, but then I realize, there's a set of clothes, and a set of armor. The clothes are soft, dark, and thin. They won't constrict or weigh me down. The armor looks like leather, and it's as light as paper, but it feels cold, like metal. The top looks like an oversized long sleeve tee shirt, and it's flexible. It seems to be crocheted. The rest looks like it was designed for rollerblading or skateboarding. There are pieces shaped like pads for the thighs, knees, and lower legs. They're arranged the way they're supposed to be worn. It's not designed for full coverage. Instead, I can feel that the pieces are connected by some kind of energy running over the whole thing. When I pick up top "pads" for the legs, the lower ones come with them.

I put on the clothes, and the armor. I head out into the lobby. There, the doc is waiting for me. The others are all gone. Doc asks if I'm sure I'm ready to do this. I'm not, but I'm going to do it anyway, and I think he knows that. What else can I do? I can't just hide in here forever. Eventually, it would be more like being imprisoned than having been given asylum, and if they were to find a way to come in after me, it would cease to be a neutral place.

The doc asks me what I'm going to do about the connection, and my shield. The reminder feels like being punched in the chest, and the expression on my face earns me a stern look. He says, "How are you going to survive if you're not ready to deal with that?"

I realize that I have no idea how to proceed. I got the feeling that the ceremony was more than just symbolic. Otherwise, she might be able to break through my emotional defenses, but she shouldn't be able to banish my shield like she does. I ask the doc why she can affect my control of energy, but I can't just work through the same connection to prevent him from changing her. He explains that I can affect her control of energy, too, but not her thoughts and feelings, and not his influence. That's why she hasn't really attacked me, because I would just be able to absorb, deflect, or diffuse the energy, just as she is. The one time I was able to affect her, it was because she wasn't expecting me to lash out. She let her guard down then, but it won't be down again. He also tells me that she's not the same spirit that she was, any more than I am the same. Just as the object I absorbed corrupted me, his energy has corrupted her. I'm going to continue to attract more things like him, and unless I release her, every single one of them is going to try to use her to manipulate me.

For a moment I don't understand what he's telling me, and then I do. There is no "the" key, but as long as I'm attached to her, she's a key, and she'll never be safe or free.

I tell him I understand, and then I start focusing on finding the place within myself where the connection is. I've unconsciously put my hands over my heart. The doc watches for a second, then stops me and explains that magic was involved in creating the bond, and energy work is required to break it. He tells me I have what I need, and I realize that in my hands, I'm holding the unity candle from our ceremony. I can see now that it's a ceramic oil lamp made to look like a candle, so that it can't diminish from burning. I understand what I have to do.

The room wavers. I'm standing in front of the door. I can feel that the "asylum" illusion is fading because I've decided to leave. If I hesitate, I'll disrupt the others' illusions, and their healing processes. The door opens, and I step out into the sunlight.

When I do, the building behind me kind of vanishes, and there's just a big parking lot. Off to my left and right are an empty street, bordered by empty sidewalks. I see the parking garage on the other side. Quickly, I surround myself with another shield, covering it with spikes, and back against a wall. Across the street, the two of them see me, and rush forward. They stop when the shield goes up. He gives her a look, and she advances on me, asking, "Why do you keep wasting your energy?"

When she's about six feet away, I hold up the candle-lamp. She stops and looks at me, and asks, "Where did you get that?" She looks confused and nervous, and suddenly I don't want to do this. I want to grab her and run back into the asylum, but I know that even though it's "there," it's not there, and it's not an option. I hold the lamp out in front of me and pour the oil on the sidewalk. I tell her "I reject you, body, mind, and spirit. I am not your partner. I am not one with you. We are unique, and separate from each other. You are not permitted to touch me." I force myself to feel separated from her, then throw the lamp down. It shatters on the pavement at her feet, and I feel like someone just ripped out my heart. I fight to not take it all back. My stomach is sick. Her face twists in shock and disbelief, then I can see tears, and she quietly says two syllables in gibberish. I don't know what the word means, but hearing it is like a kick in the gut, and I can't look at her face any more.

The creepy guy yells at her. "What is wrong with you? Take down that shield before she gets away again!"

Her hand reaches for the shield. I don't want to hurt her. I tell her, "Don't." 

She hesitates. I step between them. Now, she's to my right, and he's to my left.

She steps forward, but she doesn't touch the spikes. I stop fighting the pain, and instead push that into my shield, and I feel her step back away from me again.

She says, "I can't. I can't even touch it."

He says, "then I don't need you for that any more." I only have a split second to realize what he means. He rushes forward, his body melting into a black cloud as he moves. I throw yet another shield up, this one over both of us, and the cloud flows over it like thick ash from a volcano. I feel pressure, almost like a heavy pounding on the outside. This isn't going to hold up to that attack for very long.

She's still looking at me. It doesn't seem to have dawned on her that we're both being attacked. She's not even going to fight back against him.

Not knowing what else to do, I fuse my spiky shield with the outer shield, keeping a wall between myself and her, and begin funneling energy attacks into the outer arc of it. Lightning-like streaks zip through it, making it look like an angry thunderhead, and the pressure is reduced. The smoke rises away from the shield momentarily. I can hear laughter, but it doesn't seem to be centered anywhere. A second later, lightning from the smoke hits the shield. A single bolt impacts the side, hitting so hard that it cracks all the way to the ground.

I melt it back together, realizing that he's attacking her side of the shield to wear me down, but unable to figure out what else to do. Then, inside her half of the bubble, I see another shield go up. She's finally defending herself. I put my hands into the wall of my shield and focus as hard as I can, creating a doorway in the side, and she runs several yards away, keeping herself protected.

The ash re-forms into the creepy guy. He looks back and forth between us. I'm drawing energy for another attack, and she appears to be drawing for one, too. I worry for a moment that it's going to be directed at me, but instead, the two of them go at each other. From behind her, a huge mass of pavement rises into the air and breaks up into little pieces, which rain down on the creepy guy. He belches fire at her, melting the asphalt around her shield into a bubbling mass of goo. She's protected by her shield, but she can't go anywhere.

I fire another blast at him, but my energy is unfocused. He hasn't shielded, so the blast knocks him down the street, but I don't think it did a lot of damage. He doesn't even get up or dust off. He starts crawling toward her on his hands and feet, like a bug. His body becomes longer and thinner. When he gets to the edge of the melted down tar, he lifts up and stretches over it, striking at her shield with a punch that seems to carry more than just physical force. I see it losing its shape, a shockwave rolling through it to the other side.

I have to try again, before he breaks that shield down. I start throwing everything I can at him. If they can move stuff, then I can, too. I focus on one of the huge cement trashcans anchored to the pavement. It comes up, bringing part of the sidewalk with it. I direct it through the air, hitting him from the side. He doesn't even notice that it's coming. It knocks him back into the street and lands on top of him. He crawls out from under, and I can see that now he has many arms and legs, long fangs, and a stinger, but still the same face as before, wearing an obsessed, hungry expression. Ignoring the damage I've done to him, he turns and begins crawling back toward her. He's like some kind of predatory insect, intent only on one thing.

I run forward, hurling a stream of unfocused energy at him as I go. The anger from before breaks through, and all I can think about is him feeding on her all of this time, changing who she is, poisoning her. That acidic feeling fills my chest, and my skin feels hot again. I throw ball after ball of energy, knocking him back, bowling him over, but he keeps getting up. The wave of outrage builds up in my chest, and I let it go, directing it at him like a huge psychic blast.

The wave hits him, tearing huge chunks from the asphalt and throwing them - and him - further down the street. I'm distantly aware of the sound of someone screaming, but my focus is on the monster in front of me. Now, I'm taking whatever I can draw from everything around me, the ground, the buildings, parking meters, everything. I'm using both hands, I'm throwing a barrage of bolts, fiery blasts, and debris at him. His body is taking a pounding, and I can see that this time, damage is being done.

We're dozens of yards from where he started, far enough away that we can no longer see her. He rolls onto his feet, digs his claws into the ground, opens his mouth against the tide of my attacks, and spews out a huge cloud of flying, stinging insects, which spiral up into the air high above my head. I see his body melting into the mass of bugs, and realize he's trying to escape. I turn my attack upward, but the cloud of bugs breaks up and moves away, dodging the blast, and very soon, I can't see any of them. Fearing that they're trying to sneak back to get her, I turn and run at top speed, back the way I came.

No bugs are there, but the doc and the nurse are standing outside my lady's shield, talking to her. Something inside tells me not to go any closer. Instead, I look around. I'm expecting a surprise attack at any moment, but there isn't one. Seconds later, she drops her shield. Each of them puts a hand under one of her arms. They turn as if to walk away, and vanish. I'm pretty sure I know where she's going. He won't be able to get to her there.

I won't see her again, either.

Wreck

This was one of those really short ones that gets to me when I have it. I've had it before, and every time, I feel creeped out all day afterward. It makes me nervous about being in the car at all.

I'm riding with a colleague to a meeting. We both work for the same department of the same company. We're heading across the state for this meeting, which is about something we did that the company wants to expand to things other people are doing. The meeting is really important, and we're dressed in suits. Mine has a skirt, and I'm wearing a moderately frilly blouse with it.

The driver is one of those medium-height, (around 5'7" to 5'9") energetic, positive attitude guys. If he was a woman, I'd say perky. He's fun to work with, and I'm really glad I'm riding with him. We're enjoying the trip. We had a good lunch at a place we both like, and now we're laughing and joking as we drive.

Suddenly there is a huge, unavoidable accident in the road ahead of us. I can't tell what started it, but there is now a several car pile-up around a tanker semi. I can't see what the semi says it's carrying, but I'm worried. The driver hits his breaks and turns the wheel to avoid hitting the cars in front of us, but we still end up crunching into a little sporty two-door that is just off the right side of our lane. We aren't badly damaged, but the two-door is really crunched up. The people inside are moving, and I don't see blood, but that doesn't mean they aren't badly injured.

We are ok. We decide we should get out and see if we can help anyone. Before we can, another vehicle slams into the middle of the mass of cars all ready crashed. This vehicle is larger, but I can't see it well enough to identify what it is because I'm not looking in that direction.

The tanker truck explodes, sending cars flying. The little two-door lifts up off of the pavement, taking the front end of our car with it, then forces us backward. We're flying back, then falling as we go off the edge of the road and into what looks like a quarry. It feels like we flip over twice. We land kind of on our side, with the driver's side down. All of the glass in the car is broken, and dirt comes pouring in. I hear a sick, wet crunching sound and a scream from beside me.

Then, it's quiet except for the pattering sound of dirt falling into the car, now more slowly. I have dirt up to my knees. I look over, and my colleague is covered up past his chest. He is very pale, and his eyes are red-rimmed with anguish. On his face is an expression of grim determination. He looks at me, and his face bears an intensity I can't fathom.

I'm terrified.

He struggles to speak.. "I'm dead. See if you're buried."

Somehow, I know that he means for me to see if I can get out of the car. Before I can look, I see his eyes kind of glaze over and lose focus, his face loses all expression, and he starts quietly repeating that line over, and over. "I'm dead. See if you're buried. I'm dead. See if you're buried. I'm dead. See if you're buried." He speaks rapidly, and with no emotion, as if trying to remember a list instead of to communicate, or as if he's stuck on that one line and can't move on to the next thought. He is extremely pale.

For a moment, I am confused, and a little afraid of him, and then I realize he's dying. The crunch I heard was something under the dirt damaging his body. The pattering noise I'm hearing is not the only sound in the car. There is a trickle of liquid somewhere that I can't see. He's bleeding to death. He's repeating that line because he is stuck on it. His brain isn't getting oxygen, and he's losing consciousness. His last words were his way of telling me to get out of the car before the dirt traps me in here with him. I want to escape the sinking car, but I don't want to leave him. It's an awful feeling.


He is still repeating that line when I wake up. It's the last thing I hear before finding myself in the darkness of my room.

Every time I've had that dream, I've always awakened with a feeling of sheer terror, sure I'm trapped in that car, horrified at what has happened to my colleague, and filled with dread over the fact that I cannot do anything to help him.


The parts of the dream that I experience are so vivid and feel so real that I can't seem to shake it off when I wake up. I still feel that sense of dread and horror, and kind of a sense of guilt over having to save myself and leave my dying colleague behind. 


One of the weirdest things about how real this dream is, is the fact that the "colleague" and the job are completely nonexistent. The person in the dream is not anyone I've met in real life. He's not anyone famous, or anyone I remember seeing on TV or in movies, either. I've never worked for a department of a company in a capacity like in the dream, either.


The closest thing I have to relate to this is that I was in a terrible accident as a child. My mother, grandmother and I were traveling across the state to see family. I was sleeping in the back of the car when the accident occurred. My mother was severely injured, and nearly died of her injuries. I wasn't hurt, but it was only by chance that I wasn't killed. The only reason I survived is because of the way I was laying. Had I been facing the other direction, the car that hit us would have smashed my head.

The memory is traumatic, but not in the same way as this dream. No one actually died in that accident, and I was young enough to not understand a lot of what happened. There were only two cars involved, ours and the car that hit us. There was no semi, no explosion. It was just a really bad two car accident. They did have to use the jaws of life to get my Mom out of the car.
Some of my memory of that accident is distorted (like the way the car looked after the accident; I remember it looking much worse than I'm told it actually did) but I grew up with Mom & Grandma both very much alive afterward, so I'm pretty sure the death in this nightmare didn't come from that experience.

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.

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.

Time Warp

This one is a recurring dream. I have a lot of recurring dreams, some which are and/or should be much more upsetting than this, but this dream always leaves me with a huge feeling of loss and distress.

I'm in the doorway of a building. The building itself is made of big stone bricks, each probably about two feet long. The original door frame is made of slabs of the same stone, but there is a wooden door frame inside that. The door is big and heavy, and is standing part way open, just enough for me to lean out. Either I am short, or the door is very tall (and the ceiling very high).

The handle, which is long and curved rather than a round knob, is next to my shoulder. The street I'm looking
out at is made of cobblestones rather than paved, and there are big pot holes in it. There don't seem to be sidewalks, or at least I don't notice them. I don't see any grass, either. I am wearing a dress that feels like something out of Little House on the Prairie, but without the bonnet the girls on that show always wore.


Outside is chaos. Fire falls screaming from the sky. Everywhere it lands, there is an explosion. People are running, trying to get into buildings, with a few running from one building to another, and some just running down the street.

My main concentration is on a woman running toward me. Much about the way she looks reminds me (when I am awake) of Ma Kettle (Marjory Main) if Ma Kettle weighed more. She is moderately heavyset, but her face isn't fat. She's chesty (gravity has taken its toll) and has her dark hair up in a loose bun. The front puffs out just a little too much, and some strands have come free in front,
and are flopping around her face as she runs. Her dress is of a mostly plain style with long sleeves, but there are flowers on it. Her flat-heeled boots, the fanciest thing about her, lace up and are taller than the hem of her skirt, even though she has it hiked up so she can run. She has no jewelry.

I am yelling at her. By how fast I put the syllables together, I'm yelling two words. The first fast group of syllables is HAH-dah-sah, with all of the "a" sounds being like the a in ball. The second fast group of syllables was LOW-fin, with the ow in LOW sounding like the ow in brown and "i" in fin being so short it almost isn't there. I said the first fast group a lot more than the second. The woman is running right for the door and is only about ten yards away when fire lands on the back end of a big green truck - it is about the same size as one of the smaller U-haul trucks - and it launches into the air, turns over, and falls with the big flat back on top of her, covering her completely so I can't see her. I know she has been crushed. I yell the first three syllables again, drawing out the last "ah" sound and I'm going to say something else, but that is when I always wake up.

I don't know where the heck a dream like that would come from, except that maybe I saw it in a movie when I was a little kid - I used to sneak out of my room and hide and watch whatever Mom and Dad were watching - but in the dream I can feel the cold of the stone wall against my hand, wind blowing on my face, and the warmth of the indoors against my back, and I can smell smoke and dirt, and I always wake up from this feeling heartbroken.

I have posted about this dream before, in another blog. I was informed by a couple of commenters on that blog that the words I couldn't identify may have been real. One said that the word HAH-dah-sah is probably the name Hadassah, the Hebrew name of Queen Esther. Another agreed, then told me that Lowfin may have been the German word, laufen, pronounced the way I wrote it. Laufen means to jog, the commenter wrote, and theorized that I may have been yelling for Hadassah to run. He said the way I pronounced it as a command addressing someone formally such as a boss. It makes me think that maybe I am dreaming a scene I saw in a movie. I wonder if maybe the woman was the little girl's family member, or nanny.