Last night I thought I was dying. It seemed as if it was happening just after I switched off the bedside lamp and lay my head on the pillow, but it may well have been on into the night. Time gets squirrely. I do not even know if it was an actual physical event or if I was waking from an unremembered night terror. Sometimes my heart will skip a beat, and that is what this felt like except it was greatly magnified. I couldn’t catch my breath. My head clouded. In an instant I was miles beneath the ocean’s surface. The world was just
a pinprick glimmer in the darkness. The buzzing began — a wrenching numbness increasing in intensity inside my skull. And I panicked. To continue the nautical metaphor, I clumsily thrashed my way toward the surface, toward the world, toward life. Struggling. My mind was one feverish question: "is this it?". There was no grand replay of precious life events, no white light, no feeling but fear. I reached the surface and my head instantly cleared. My buzzing brain went silent. I lay under the bedsheets panting, relieved, wondering whether I was waking from a dream or had simply experienced another nocturnal palpitation. If that is the case, it was a prolonged and intense version. And, of course, for all I know it was all imaginary. A scary, remembered moment though, whatever it was. I’m glad I’m still around. Today was a nice day.
That was just the beginning of a night brimming with weirdness. The subsequent dreams were scrambled particles of my partitioned life. There was a school audit going on, although I was on vacation at the same time. My wife was there along with all my coworkers, my dog, my parents’ dogs, and at least one ex-girlfriend. The audits were unusually precarious, and for no good reason. There was just a feeling of dread over the whole thing. Then, there was an airplane buzzing a lake while we sat and lunched on the pier. The plane made two circuit loops where it would zoom down over our heads, skim the water, then rocket up into the sky again. The third circuit was fatal. It dove too low, tried to bank and pull up, and dipped its left wing into the lake. The wing was immediately torn off and propelled toward our position at the shoreline. The remainder of the airplane plunged into some marina buildings across the way while the wing bisected an automobile just tens of feet away from us. One of the dogs got loose in the woods behind the mountain cabin where we were staying. We sent helicopters up to look for the dog, which ended up falling off the mountain and finding its way back to the house. When we discovered him under a blanket with a large cut in his side and I was freaking out trying to figure the best way to get him to an animal hospital, my mother’s response (yes, my mother suddenly appeared) was "ah well, we’ll just take him to the vet in morning" as if it was a simple scratch. The next morning my wife and I were searching for something on the mountainside and found ourselves in the middle of a large mud patch in the middle of a rainstorm.
That’s all I’ve got. It is a jumbled mess, I know. The dream notebook has not worked as well as I had hoped. If I could write these things down while they are still fresh in my mind, it would likely be somewhat more coherent if not more logical. The number of lucid dreams has become more frequent over the past couple of weeks. Not sure what I am doing differently, but it definitely makes the nighttime more interesting. Also, it provides me with material when I am otherwise uninspired. I guess even death scares have their bright sides.