(no subject)

[felicula]

At 5-something this morning I woke up from what was, perhaps, one of the more disturbing dreams I have ever had. Ever heard the superstition that if you die in a dream, you die for real? Now I know for sure that it isn't true.

Setting: I think I can best describe this as taking place in "lava fjords"... There were lots of sheer drops, red-orange coloration, pinnacles connected by rope bridges... If you play WoW, think thousand needles crossed with burning steppes.

mechanchaos and I were doing out tax returns. For some reason we were filing separately and not jointly. I noticed something in the paperwork where there was much, much more personal information required... like sexuality, religion, political views, and the like. Media rumors had it that people were being taken into custody if they fit certain radical profiles, but there was a way you could provide documentation, sealing certain bits in different envelopes, where they would be more likely to process the return without checking them, or so the rumor went.

I noticed that mechanchaos hadn't put one section worth of documentation in a concealing envelope. I wanted to warn him, but was afraid that saying it directly would get us noticed. (There were no houses in the dream, everything done by everyone was visible from above, with the sense that someone was indeed watching.) I tried to encourage him to package it up before handing it to George W. Bush (yes, directly), but I don't know whether he did or not.

At that point, I was picked up and put in a coffin without a lid. I was alive, and terrified. There were a number of similar coffins all on one particular ledge. They were on camera and broadcast by the media. Those of us in them were being portrayed as casualties of the war in Iraq. I was alive, though, and moved around, struggling. I think I was bound in some way, because I couldn't get out. George W. Bush was overseeing the publicity and decided that it looked bad that some of his bodies in boxes were still moving. He gave the order for every body to be injected with something that would paralyze us and stop us from breathing. I could hear all of this, but I couldn't do anything to get away.

I had my eyes open when the technician came by with the syringe and injected me. At once I could no longer move at all. My vision blurred. I got a mental impression that George W. Bush liked it now that his bodies in boxes were tidier. I stopped breathing. I began to wonder how long it would take me to suffocate.

An earthquake shook the cliffs, jostling the coffins and sending mine over the edge. My stomach flipped as I fell hundreds of feet downward. The coffin rotated as it fell, landing in the lava sideways. I felt myself burst into flames, not yet suffocated but burning alive, then lost consciousness.

At this point I woke up. It took me a moment of heavy breathing to realize. I am me. This is my body. This is my breathing. I am alive. I'm not dead. I am alive. Once my breathing calmed a little, I wiggled my fingers just to reassure myself that I wasn't paralyzed. My thoughts raced, and I committed the dream to memory so I could write about it. Luckily, after such a busy weekend, I was tired enough to fall back asleep until morning. Still, dreaming through such a vivid and terrible death is not something I'd like to do again anytime soon. Weird.