Twisted Spinster

I don’t usually dream — at least nothing I can remember. But when I do, the dreams are invariably weird. Not so much for their content as for the complete conviction, while I am dreaming, that this is real — it’s actually happening — but not only that, I am equally aware (while I am dreaming) that I have a waking life, and that that waking life is false. Also, my dreams are usually just fragments, as if I suddenly broke into my “real” life in mid-happening, I’m me, but I usually don’t remember any specifics of who I am in my dream when I wake up. (I’m just “me” — I just don’t know who “me” is. It could be me, as I am really, or “me” as I am “really.” Confused enough?)

Anyway, in my dream last night this time I am suddenly looking up into the night sky because a very bright, lightning-like formation has broken across it. But the formation isn’t so fast that I can’t tell that it’s not lightning — it’s something else, a gigantic structure of some sort. I’m standing outside somewhere near a swampy area that is also near buildings — something like the neighborhood near where I used to live in in Miami, out in the west part where Tamiami Trail continued on past Sweetwater and a cement factory and on into the undeveloped land next to the Everglades, from about SW 112 Avenue to Krome Avenue. (That area has since been built up, I believe.) At the time there was an apartment or condo complex and a housing development on 112 Avenue, and then the homes petered out into flat lands that were mostly lots full of nothing but grass and stands of melaleuca and Australian pines.

Anyway, the landscape in my dream was sort of like that. I was standing outside one of the condos, staring up at the structure, which was oblong in shape, and could only be seen when something like lightning ran across it in a kind of zigzag. My first thought was “that’s an alien space ship, and it’s going to crash. That light is either something hitting it, or it’s own sort of distress lights.” I am vaguely aware of some people around me, the people of the community, all as shocked and worried as I am. And stranger still, we all know what the ship is, who it belonged to — there’s some sort of recent history involving aliens which had been the main worry in recent times leading up to this, and these events were somehow expected.

Anyway, the structure slid across the sky as a barely-perceptable shadow, and then the lights ran across it again, and we realized it was closer to the earth and also farther to the west. I had the perception that is was going to land in the sea on the other side of the land, and that the sea was far away like the Gulf, but not so far away that this was not going to be a disaster for all of us standing there. I started to turn away, realizing that it surely was going to crash any minute. An interval of time passed — not very long — as I made my way back through the crowd, which was just starting to panic. I was thinking of my cats. I didn’t think I could take my cats with me as I fled — I remember clearly thinking that the electromagnetic pulse would surely knock out all the electricity for miles around, which meant my car wouldn’t work, which meant that even if I did manage to drive some ways before the pulse reached us, meant I would end up having to walk, and my cats were indoor cats — they couldn’t walk with me and I had nothing to carry them with. I was thinking of just leaving the cat food bag open, and filling all my bowls with water, and trying not to realize that the cats would probably end up dying anyway, from the force of the blast if nothing else. And in fact, I doubted I would survive.

Then there was a low but heart-stopping “boom” and I turned involuntarily to see that the entire sky had gone pearl white. Then I saw the vast, grey-white (I remember the two different shades of white very distinctly) cloud of the blast, rather oval shaped instead of round, coming towards us from the west.

Then I woke up.