I find dreams don’t always translate well to story form. Feel free to stop reading if you agree. Or if you have dreams of the end of the world all the time. Or ever? Actually I might feel a little better if you do.
My dream went like this:
The government announced a warning, quite vague in nature, at about 1:30 pm. It was advised that citizens should go to various locations – school and community centres, by 3:30 pm. Word on the street was end-of the-world badness was expected at exactly 3:30 pm, but of course no one knew if it was real or not.
Lots of people, myself included, when to the suggested “safe house”, just in case. It was a large school, and government officials had added some material to the windows are doors. It was clear that the plan was to shut us in. The cell phone networks were jammed as everyone tried to get ahold of their loved ones, myself included. It was mostly “can you believe they announced this” with a side of “well, I suppose I may never see you again….nah”, and that of course was just if you could get a line.
The next thing I knew, I looked at the time on my phone (very clearly my Samsung Cleo flip phone – part of what made this dream creepy was the detail) and it was 3:28. I’d been mostly paying attention to trying to get a line, so the time snuck up on me. A few people decided to check out a window by shifting a big piece of wood to the side. It was very very dark outside in the very very bad way.
I wonder if I was thinking about the David Cronenberg movie Last Night , which I watched ages ago. (Based in Toronto! I need to watch this movie again – I remember liking it). The end of the world is not explained in the movie any more than it was in my dream, but there are some major similarities none the less. In the movie, the world is supposed to end at midnight, and all we get as a clue to whether or not it’s actually happening it that it’s still very very bright out at the evening progresses.
In my dream, the world doesn’t end at 3:30, but clearly something terrible is happening. Chaos, death, mass hysteria. Eventually I leave the school, because rumour has it that shit is going down outside. I’d be more specific, but my dream rumour-mongers were not.
The exciting conclusion involved me running amok, amid the chaos. I passed a group of about 30 people, down a hill from me, trying to move a large wooded structure of some kind. I didn’t know what they were trying to do, but it was clearly important because people were dying in the process. I tried to figure out what they were doing so I could make a better decision on whether or not to help. I moved on, in a group of people, trying to avoid areas of chaos, without really knowing what was going on it the “bad areas”. I lost my shoes, and ran around with bloody feet.
The next “scene” after I lost my shoes, the chaos caught me: now I was in a direct area of screaming and dying. I woke up when I died in the now comic-way: someone dumping a bucket of goop on my head. So silly.
I woke up and was convinced that I couldn’t possibly dream something that nasty unless something had really really gone wrong. I picked up my phone, expecting it to ring with some sort of terrible news.
Then I just went back to sleep with no more nonsense. Still, never again would be too soon.
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