My paranoid and morbid subconscious.

I always have apocalyptic dreams. And they scare the living bajeezus out of me.

It's this weird duality of knowing that it's a dream while I'm asleep, but it feeling so damn real. So I'm in this really deep sleep living out a terrifying Armageddon and experiencing unbelievable anxiety that I can't get out of but continually waver between believing it is real or realizing it is a dream.

And when I finally wake up, I take a huge breath and become extremely relieved that everything that just happened was not real and I don't have to deal with it anymore. I can get out of bed, pour myself some coffee and enjoy a peaceful, quiet morning.

Despite the terrible feelings I get from them, I must say my apocalyptic dreams are much more interesting than the cliched apocalypse concepts of the real world. If I turned my dreams into sci-fi novels or short stories, I'm pretty sure they would be pretty damn sweet. Maybe I will someday.

The one I had last night was about this terrible storm that was going to hit. The most important things that kept repeating themselves were the image of the sky as the storm clouds approached and how this was a "Level 12 storm" which I don't think really exists in meteorology but it was the science that was in my dream. The black clouds looked like slowly horizontally moving black hell fire with white spikes shooting out as lightning. The county or city I was in had prepared and everyone was to leave their homes and camp out in this massive pasture area.

All I kept thinking in my head was, "The last storm was a 10. This one is a 12." But I never could figure out if that was a bad thing or a good thing. I knew it was going to be severely worse. The effect of how the sky and land felt and looked seemed so...snow globe like. I could feel and see the roundness of the ground and sky.

Then I remember my family and I had to get to a family friend's house. She was an old lady that wasn't going to this rescue camp thing. She was gong to stick it out. On the way there, the street of an almost archaic and old village like residential area was completely barren and dark with the occasional glint of light from the windows of people who chose to stick it out. Occasionally on the street there would be stragglers--late night doctors who had to stay longer at the hospital quickly running to the pasture.

When we left that lady's house, the dream just blacked out and skipped to a much later point in time....as if the storm happened and I just blacked out through all of it. The dream started again in my kitchen. I asked my sister what happened and why did we come back to our house. She said that they said we could go home. The storm wasn't over and hadn't even really began, but that it was okay to go back. The air of this comment was unsure, as though it wasn't entirely and definitively okay.

The dream ended with that comment from my sister followed by, "Yeah it's not over yet but they won't refund the money."

Apparently this rescue pasture cost $35 a person. Nobody said that but I just knew it in my dream.

I'm pretty sure if I tried heavy hallucinogens I would go permanently mad from paranoia.