Dreams: Nightmares are funny things. They blend together all the anxieties your little brain can concoct, and then fold in anecdotes, movie clips, family tensions and work stress for the perfect mélange of terror to make you shake and sweat and wake with your mind as twisted as the sheets. When I was little, the roots of my night frights were obvious – tornadoes (too many readings of The Wizard of Oz), nuclear disaster (too many civil defense drills at school), schools buses (well, not quite as obvious, but I had a long ride to school and the drivers weren’t exactly Freddy Kruger, but they didn’t wear a cardigan and tennis shoes either). Last night I had one of those dreams that will haunt me for days. It had at least a dozen different scenes, some directly related to the main thematic elements (terrorism, being caught apart from family when an attack happens), and others that were tangential at best.

I was sitting at a window table in a restaurant in San Francisco, having a meal with people who were attending a business meeting with me. At least a few of them were from San Francisco. The skyline looked more like New York, filled with old skyscrapers and gray air. I looked out the window and saw a tall building collapse, dropping to the ground as if it had been imploded like an antiquated sports stadium. I looked at the San Francisco natives and asked, “Earthquake or terrorists?” “Terrorists,” they responded. We ran from the restaurant out into the streets where more buildings were collapsing and people were being shot and killed by debris falling from the buildings.

I frantically searched for a safe place and ended up in an apartment that looked a lot like a third floor walk-up I shared with one of my college roommates in lovely Conshohocken, PA. This one had a few people in it already who populated what appeared to be a library reading room. It also featured a balcony overlooking a courtyard. As I was leaving to find a more suitable place to stay, a tall Russian (I don’t know how I knew he was Russian, but, being a child of the late 50s my Cold War fears are deeply rooted and he just *looked* like an evil Russian) came into the apartment carrying cedar boards that he was going to use to close in the balcony so that the residents couldn’t conspire with those outside. Seems like a pretty expensive choice of wood to silence the opposition.

Anyway, I materialized in another, far swankier apartment. This one was apparently owned by a woman who was wealthy, a size 2, and had peculiar tastes in food. I rooted through her clothing drawers, trying desperately to find something that was warm and would fit (I was convinced that winter was imminent and that I had to find appropriate clothing immediately). Several other women were also looking through her wardrobe and we commented on how sad it was that she would never get any use out of the dozens of sequined and beaded formal dresses that hung in her closet. I finally found a pale orange sweater that would fit; the label in it read “CHEAT: 1”, which I presumed had something to do with the line of clothing and whether you actually bought the size that was supposed to fit you. There were other displays of clothing and jewelry that looked like they had been taken from a department store, but there was nothing usable among them.

Now that I was outfitted for the nuclear winter that was about to descend, I had to find food. My clothing foraging had taken precious time and other looters had already been through the foodstuffs. Her apartment had a kitchen that contained a grocery-store-like display of non-perishables, but that had already been taken by the time I got there. The only things left were tiny bottles that held 4 olives each, packages of twin marshmallows, and some other unidentified jarred food (gefilte fish?). I took what I could and turned to find my cousin Amy in the room with me (there was also a dark-haired concierge in the corner, but he didn’t seem willing or able to help, keeping his head down and reading whatever was in front of him). Amy was teary-eyed and told me that she had tried to spend more time with her mother recently because she knew something like this was going to happen.

Our adventures continued as we left the apartment on a quest to get home. We came across a place where bright green, newly painted mining cars came to the surface and raced around a track, rather like a very unsafe roller coaster. We debated about getting on – some people were boarding, others were exiting, but we elected not to because we didn’t know where it would take us and it appeared to go very fast around the corners. We passed a large cliff that a man was going to jump from, but whose face he rolled down instead. All of this was layered into the concern that I couldn’t get in touch with Caitlin. She was at our house, and I tried to call on her cell phone, but she didn’t answer and the regular phones weren’t working.

These are merely the fragments I remember – there was some much larger context that I’ve by now forgotten. This dream contains references to The Time Traveler’s Wife, the book I just finished reading (the concierge was a link to the main character who is a librarian), Stephen King’s Dark Tower series (the terminus of the mining car ride), the argument I had with Caitlin when I dropped her off at camp yesterday (not being able to get in touch with her), a TV commercial for cholesterol medication (the woman in the commercial is wearing one of the dresses that was in the closet), Disney World (roller coaster rides), my sister’s next door neighbors (Russians who are tearing down my grandparent’s home), and innumerable other elements. This is what my mind is doing when it should be preparing lists for going to the beach. I’m thinking that Rocky Road ice cream right before bed is probably not a good choice.