I rarely dream about death. Most of my dreams involve some sort of panic, but more often than not that panic is brought about by my inability to meet some sort of deadline in my dream. Not being able to move fast enough, doing things incorrectly and having to repeat them, being so scatterbrained that I can’t get things done in a logical order…stuff like that.

But I rarely dream about death.

Even more rare are dreams in which the goings on of the dream feel exactly like reality. 99% of the time I know in my dreams that I’m dreaming.

But last night? Death, very realistic-feeling dream, and not being able to move fast enough. Some of the main reasons why this most recent dream was the most symbolic, terrifying, and upsetting one I’ve ever had in my entire life.

I went to bed at 6:30 in the morning and must have started dreaming right away. In the dream I find myself in a large white flattened cube of a house. The walls are bare except for two low-lying rectangular windows that are opened and cannot be shut. One window sits above a huge white bathtub; the other sits above my chair and computer stand (holding Vaio).

My knowledge in the dream is that I live with my father and that he is, at the time, out to church and won’t be back for awhile.

So I’m sitting there minding my own business when suddenly it starts raining outside. Almost immediately the water reaches the low windows and starts pouring into the house. I’m not panicked, but I feel worried as I rapidly try to gather up all of our stuff in the house and wrap it in protective plastic wrap. This being one of my dreams, of course I’m unable to move fast enough. I’m slogging through the water, vainly trying to cover things in plastic, all the while watching some of my most important things (Vaio, all my backups for my files, my chair), disintegrate and dissolve in the water. While all this is happening I’m thinking to myself, “dad’s going to blame me for all of this, even though it’s not my fault the water came in and it’s not my fault our windows are so low to the ground.”

Anyway, the rain and flooding finally stop and all the water except for the water in the bathtub miraculously disappears, leaving only small puddles of our mostly dissolved possessions. I wasn’t able to save anything in the house.

At this point my dad comes back and immediately notices that everything but the bathtub is in ruins on the floor. He’s not angry, surprisingly, but is questioning me with increasing panic in his voice. “What happened? Where’s all our stuff? Why’s the house ruined? Why did you ruin the bathtub?” I vehemently argued that I didn’t ruin the bathtub, which only makes him panic more. He’s wandering around the house all bewildered, wondering what to do next.

He tells me he’s going to go outside and check on our shed to see if anything in there survived. I follow him. As we walk down the sidewalk I notice that every cat we’ve ever known is lying dead in some rigor mortis-induced contortion scattered across the lawn. As we continue walking, dead butterflies and birds start to drop from the sky.

We reach the shed, which has been reduced to nothing more than its foundation. The only thing left “inside” it is an old industrial trunk. Neither my dad nor I knew what was in it; we were just overjoyed that some artifact of our lives was spared from the flood/storm.

I call my mom and she comes over to keep me company while dad continues pacing around the house in a mild panic. I start showing her the remains and the dead cats and the trunk, and her only remark is, “that’s so interesting! Wow!” And I just have this tremendous, unbearable sense of loss and hopelessness. All I keep saying is, “it’s all gone. All of it, it’s all gone.”

I woke up with my pillow in a death grip half an hour later, unsure of where I was.  But when I finally realized that my dream was actually a dream and NOT reality, I freaking lost it. I lay in bed bawling for at least fifteen minutes, then curled up in the covers and had a nice little freak-out.

I haven’t told any of you much about my life’s situation at this point other than what I’ve put in this blog, but I think the main reason this dream freaked me out so much is that it was so representative of how I’ve been feeling lately. It was so full of symbolic messages related to my worries, concerns, situation, future, and general mood that I think my brain didn’t want to handle it all subconsciously anymore and so decided to spew forth a nice little half-hour-long terror session during my REM time.

Flarusadofhdaghghghg. That was a draining experience.

Gonna go play New Vegas now. Need to mellow out.