I guess I should get used to this workout of the subconscious

I have always had really vivid dreams, and i tend to remember them well after having them. The most memorable and strange ones are usually the ones i have when the world around me is in uproar. I guess my subconscious is trying to work out the problems of the world in my head at night.

My first recollection of my wild dreams were the week after the Challenger explosion. I was in 8th grade and we were home for a snow day. I remember my sister walking in the bathroom and telling me that the Challenger had exploded and I remember how unfathomable it was. For many people my age, i think that was the first realization that humans, and technology, and the United States as a superpower were not untouchable. More personally, I think it dawned on me that adults were just people, like kids are just people. I thought to myself, "wow, adults can miscalculate, and people get blown to smithereens while their families look on." It was my first realization that I wasn't bulletproof, that really fucked up things happen, and there is not a damn thing one can do about it except stand and stare, jaw dropped open, and thanking the heavens that there but for the Grace of God go I. Okay, I didn't use the work "fuck" yet in 8th grade, but i definitely sensed that meaning of the word before I knew the word itself.

In the week after the Challenger tragedy, I had five nights in a row of the same nightmare. Mrs. Sparrow's science class was being held in my front yard. We were sitting around in a circle and it was a beautiful, sunny cloudless day. The sun glinted off the silver of ever-increasing numbers of airplanes that were circling overhead. The circle became tighter and tighter, an eddy of airliners, the sky became grey and the wind stirred the leaves in the trees as if a storm was coming up, the leaves turning their undersides for the world to see. A black hole opened up in the center of the sky over our heads and the planes were increasingly sucked towards the drain it created, and then the whirlpool began sending them into the hole, and we all watched in horror and silence until the last plane was gone. The hole closed up on itself and the silence was broken by the sound of a large metal door clanging shut. And then I wake. Five nights in a row, I woke up in a sweat, frightened and breathless, and no longer a child.

I often think of that feeling of helplessness, in the face of something unimaginable taking place in front of one's eyes, as what it might be like to have been present in New York for 9/11. Mostly, I try not to think about it at all. Lately, though, with the Middle East in turmoil, i think of those other events, of the horror and the feeling of helplessness, and the sense that things are uncontrollable and rolling towards certain destruction. I sense the same thing these days. And so I dream.

This morning, I awoke to Rollie climbing in bed with us, and realized that it was real and not the dream i had been having, where I frantically tried to find cover for him, Todd, matilda, and myself. In my dream, we were at Lenox Mall, in the parking deck where i usually park, the one on Lenox road, nearest the elevators, where they put the Pink Pig at Christmas. It was some kind of shelter, as if we were under attack, in the same way people must be in shelters in Israel and Lebanon right now. We were in our car (okay, we drive a van) and a man with a bullhorn was walking around giving directions about where to go and what to do. He was sarcastic in the face of danger, and I think he may have been David Spade. A woman in another car was telling me that she knew tons of people in the military, and they never miss their mark, and they never do things that aren't necessary. Dream me was doubtful. David Spade started yelling on the bullhorn at a blonde, outrageously-dressed woman who was singing near the entrance to a stairwell and when she turned around, he said, "Pink! Get outta there! They are sending one right in here in minutes!" Pink took off running and her thighs were impressive and shapely in her miniskirt.

People became panicky, and cars were trapped in traffic and people started leaving their cars and then i realized that Rollie wasn't in the car at all, that he was still with the rest of the kids in the nursery, and that they had gone to see the puppet show upstairs. I left Matilda with Todd and raced to find them. The children and their caretakers had heard of the incoming attack also and the children were being shuffled downstairs to the basment of the parking deck, down the very stairwell by which Pink was singing, the one that was going to take an impending hit. I raced down and found Rollie. I grabbed his hand and dragged him, scared and crying, to meet Todd and Matilda in the basement. People were coming towards us in a rush, like a river that we must swim against, and then I saw Todd under a dingy light bulb, and he was naked, and trying to wrap a dirty, wet rug around his waist to cover himself. He and Matilda had to desert the car and so he had her in the stroller, but as he used his hands to wrap the rug around himself, the throng of people carried her stroller along with them. I managed to grab the handle, as Todd's eyes met mine, and I still held rollie's hand, but when I woke up, i was losing my grip on both.

P.s. Mom. I'm fine. Promise.