Nightmare
Posted By Russ Emerson on March 13, 2005 at 2:53 pm
For the last few years, I’ve had a recurring dream. Not every night, but once every two or three or four weeks, I suppose.
It’s never exactly the same dream, as far as I can recall. But the end of the story is always the same: I get killed in a car accident.
Sometimes in the dream, it’s my fault. Sometimes it’s another driver’s fault. I rear-end someone at 50 MPH, someone t-bones me in an intersection, someone crosses the center divider. And sometimes, it’s no one’s fault at all. Falling trees on a windy day, earthquakes while I’m on a bridge… once it was an airplane crashing on the freeway. Deus ex machina, I suppose.
But I always wake up in the nick of time — usually a small fraction of a second before the crash. That’s bad enough, but sometimes I wake up after. After the broken bones, the burns, the maiming. Those are the worst.
When I wake up, it is with the certain knowledge that if it had been real, I’d not be here to tell you about it.
I really seriously wish I would stop having that dream.