I just woke from a dream this… morning…. I don’t have too many terror nightmares or choking-in-my-sleep dreams… but this one felt so real to life. After a chase and crash in a car, I found myself in a carport garage, with a white car up on blocks… I was running from someone, because I could feel the urgency that we had to get it fixed right away so I could get out of town… the entire right, bottom, front side was destroyed… my father was at the front of the car on his back, looking at the damage…

[note: I never worked on cars with my dad. I never worked on cars, period. I don’t know anything about cars. I don’t know anything about repairing cars.]

I had some kind of welding tool in one hand, and a flashlight in the other and somehow knew what the problem was, and that I needed to get under the car to weld the hole that was dripping oil.

I crawled around the side, flashed my light underneath, and from the corner of my eye, I barely caught a glimpse of something moving.

I slowly snuck to the back end of the car as I told my dad that something bright orange was under there, and that he should move back as well… I said I thought it was either a giant slug or a walrus…

As I bent down to look again from the tail end of the car, I aimed my flashlight, and in the blink of an eye the thing jumped out and wrapped itself around my right arm. It WAS a giant slug. I started wrestling with it as it gripped me tighter and tighter…

and then… I jerked out of the dream and woke up in my bed… I was wrapped up in my comforter blanket, and it was twisting around my arm…. but the dream was still halfway in my consciousness, and I started beating my blanket all over to make sure there wasn’t something inside… (not because I thought there might be a real monster in my bed, but because I was worried that something real WAS in my bed that made me dream such a thing).

I jumped up, still frantically beating the blanket all over in a crazed panic… and there was… nothing.

The End.

In my dream last night, I was visiting an old, elementary school chum-friend in his high-rise, penthouse suite apartment. After some good catchup, feel-good conversation, I wandered over to the giant, double-door window to check out the killer view across the city and countryside.

Far off in the distance, the sky was strangely turning muddy and grey, washing out the sun into dusk (in the middle of the day). A big, faded watercolor wash, swallowing up the next town over.

At the horizon line, coming down the hills and shooting out of the grey wall, like a lone surfer coming out of an Endless Summer tube, a tiny orange sliver appeared. It looked like a moving lava stream. It was so far away and it was a slow trickle, at first.

It took a minute of staring and refocusing and curiosity and awe… to realize it was actually a huge fire storm racing towards us… a giant wall of fire… at cataclysmic, tsunami speed… ripping through everything in its path…

I yelled to my friend (who was in the back bedroom) that we had to run… get out… NOW… immediately… I frantically scrambled to his kitchen, grabbed my guitar case, and bolted out the door into the hallway… running down the hall and down the fire escape stairwell, the circular hallway of cement steps. I could hear the crackling firestorm approaching outside, getting closer, closer.

Stop.
I was suddenly shaken out of my sleep.
It didn’t occur to me until later that there might have been a real fire that I should have been up checking around the entire house. I just went back to sleep (it turns out, there was no real fire)… but I am sure it all meant something… symbolically… sub-conciously… something important that I should be paying close attention to…