True account to the best of my recall. (Because the memory function rapidly deteriorates immediately upon crossing the membrane from sleeping to waking — the sudden influx of sensory inputs taxes one’s will in an overpowering way.) Note: look here to see other dream narrations within this series.

I am in a comfortable modern loft style apartment, apparently resident there, together with a woman whom I knew well 30 years ago. We were together, a couple, yet it was the present time. We are standing in a living room and there is an enormous panoramic window, but we are not quite positioned to look out it. A curtain is partially drawn. We feel and hear an enormous explosion, neither near nor far, and we feel it also as a thud in our chest. We know right away from the sound that it is something earth-shattering which just happened, which is happening. I go to the window and New York City at a distance of perhaps ten miles to the east has unmistakeably been struck with a nuclear weapon. The entire southern half of Manhattan is demolished, There is a very ugly massive black and grey cloud mushrooming above the city. and then with some alarm we both notice that rolling clouds of dust and debris, as tall as a house, are approaching us down several visible parallel avenues and streets in the town between us and NYC. I estimate we we have about five minutes tops before it reaches our location. We grab hands and run to the elevators. She wants to take something but I say no time, only wallets. We have to get to the car and exit the garage and drive west as fast as possible. And before tons of other fleeing persons hopelessly congest the suitable roadways.

We are driving now, looking behind us. As I desperately try to navigate the best route out of the town while heading west away from the holocaust, a sequence of little vexing obstacles hinder me. There is no web-hosted navigation device; we rely upon the map in my head. It is like the way driving was thirty years ago. Then here, a moving van slowing the lane while sprawled across the road. And there, some road workers closing off traffic to repair a traffic light. A detour sign forcing a temporary northward heading. A roadsign missing I used to know which pointed out such and such a town this way 8 miles. And so on. Many little hindrances. Everyone seems oblivious to the radioactive devastation so nearby. Gradually, not even my lady friend is present anymore in the car. It is just me striving for some unreachable goal, strategizing about possible hotels to stay at in Pennsylvania, or Ohio. Everything gradually falls apart; the dream sequence loses coherence. The plot dissolves into meaningless vignettes. Even the escape goal evaporates.

The dream does not so much end but morph. Instead I experience a series of unrelated little ‘dreamlets’ as I call them. Nothing more than undirected vignettes and disconnected scenes. I gradually awaken from this. The main thing persisting till the end sithat lingering sense of frustration: there was something I was supposed to accomplish. But it is no longer relevant in the present context and I have no control over the cascading scenarios. None of which I explicitly remember.

Waking Thoughts

As near as I can remember, I have never before dreamt a nuclear explosion… especially one that I witnessed. A markedly unusual, for me, aspect of this dream is that it happened the immediate next morning after the previous dream I wrote about. And recalled! It is rare these days that two nights in a row produce dreams memorable enough to make a lasting impression on me. I theorized perhaps because I’ve launched a mini-project to write about my dreams on ||SWR||, my experienced recall of my dreaming is improving. Unsure. This dream was more like a typical dream for me in several ways. It was fuzzier. Like other dreams, it featured a figure from my past who was yanked out of temporal context into roughly the present time. Really it felt more like the very near future. For in the dream I had an awareness of Trump’s disgustingly guilt-free misguided “excursion” into war with Iran, and also the sensation that the nuclear explosion was likely a consequence somehow of that aggression. So — near the present time but slightly in the future. Yet the ex-wife teleported into it from thirty years ago and we resided together in the loft with a view of NYC. She was not her earlier self but her present self; our bodily appearances however were youthful. The other element which is very familiar in dreams of mine as a sort of recurrent theme was the mood or feeling at the end, the last half really, in which something is envisioned as a goal but repeatedly frustrated from happening. (We could never quite get a safe enough distance west because myriad little obstacles and circumstances prevented it). This mood-feeling and the way the dream had no clear ending but hazily transitioned into completely unrelated scenarios and became less coherent is a very familiar and repeated one to me, speaking dream-wise.

The one less fuzzy moment in the dream was the scary one: hearing the explosion and feeling the shock wave in the chest, and looking out the large window to see black-gray dust engulfing half of the view. Also watching the rollong clouds of radioactive dust moving towards us down the streets of the next town was visually vivid. Hopefully there is zero element of foresight in all this. I am not really anything close to an apocalyptic thinker after all, and this sort of vivid theme is really out of the blue for me. In life or in dreams. The other item which puzzles me is why this particular person, my ex-wife of three decades ago whom I was very close with, would be selected to be in this situation with me. But a wiser person than I once wrote that it is mostly unfruitful to try and analyze dream particulars for meanings. Rather, he advised, one should look to the emotional tones within the dream to search for significance. Hmmm.

_______RS

Image : detail from Marc Chagall’s 1918 oil painting ‘Above The City’. Chagall maybe as much as any other well-known artist devoted himself to subconcious elements and dream imagery in his work. This work depicts him embracing his wife floating over their hometown of Vitebsk in current day Belarus (just north of Ukraine), perhaps in a floating weightless dream consciousness.

► Handy INDEX — scan through all available ||SWR|| articles