In my teens, I was plagued by nightmares of nuclear annihilation. I’m not sure what brought it on, but I would frequently have nightmares usually ending in seeing missiles flying through the air, the sounds of them falling from the sky, and then wake up just at the point of impact. And the worst part of this is I would usually end up laying in bed awake, eyes wide staring at the window, through which he morning sun was doing a great impression of a nuclear explosion. There’s nothing like waking up from a dream about atomic destruction to a pretty realistic visual approximation of atomic destruction.
The nightmares have subsided. Maybe with the end of the cold war? But I haven’t had any nightmares like that in a while. So, last night…
I had commissioned some art sculpture for some reason. The artist produced my sculpture as these four poles of wax. Each pole was about four feet tall, and brown with rounded tops. The sides were not smooth - the sculptor had formed each pole by hand from block wax. They were mounted on some wooden base in a straight line about four inches apart.
Impressed with the effort, I asked what had inspired the work. Apparently, the sculpture had been inspired by a vision of the artist of the future, and represented the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The artist had apparently foreseen a great plague, and was inspired to create this thing.
I was no longer impressed by the sculpture. And that’s when the alarm went off.
Now, today is not my day to get up with the alarm (which is a silly notion that I should describe in more detail in a different post), so I got up, pushed the snooze button, and went back to bed for 7 minutes. I did this 8 times. And in between each press of the snooze, I dreamed more about the artist, the sculpture, his premonition, and the eventual destruction of the human race. Note that I’m never able to do this on purpose with dreams I enjoy. Yet, in slow-motion, mumbling curses about the four horsemen while I stumbled to the alarm clock, the end of our world unfolded in 7-minute increments.
I hate these dreams that seem like portents. Thankfully, we survived the nuclear annihilation of my teens. Hopefully, the plague never materializes either.
