Dreaming ahead

I've had several big "natural disaster" dreams ahead of the actual events. So, I'm not really sure what my most recent one might mean.

One of the first times I realized I was sensitive to human disasters was for the Oklahoma City bombing. I remember I just felt terrible and stayed home from school that day. After seeing the events on the news I was certain that this event had something to do with what had made me feel so yucky. I was about 12.

September 10, 2001, I also stayed home "sick" and felt horrible, but for no apparent reason that I could figure. The next morning, I found out and while I was as dazed as everyone else -- I still felt like I had the answer to my previous day's lethargy and bad feelings all over.

A month before Hurricane Katrina landed at New Orleans, I had a dream that I was at a conference there and a storm was coming. I'd dreamed New Orleans pretty heavily over the years (despite only having visited once) and even believe I have seen a soulmate in some of these dreams on a regular basis. In the dream, many people stayed and were certain that just because the storm would be bad it wouldn't affect them. I watched as the buildings took extreme damage and then the black water covered everything. I was so shocked by all I saw that (even before I was a journalist) I ran searching for a camera to photograph it, but all I could find was a one covered in pink pleather and it didn't have film or batteries.

A few weeks before the Sri Lankan tsunami, I began a colored pencil drawing of a vision, letting the colors be where they wanted and the motions of the image come. I drew a great wave with a spiked, top that held a sun with a volcano directly beneath it and under a large body of water. The wave went over the earth and there were many more suns in the sky, the whole top of the image was covered in suns. It felt terrifying but was really pretty well-done.

I bring all these up to explain why, after my most recent dream I hope to record things a little more publicly.

Friday morning, about 7:30 a.m. I dreamed it was night in a place I called "New York" -- though it might have been anywhere American and urban. There were many large old buildings and the lay of the land where all of it took place was where shadows will mostly keep unless it's high noon or close to it. I was called out to a place where the city's workers had removed part of a street, dug deep and had been attempting to repair the big old sewer. The director on the project, a middle aged man who might have been some sort of engineer, said to me, "We were trying to fix it and found lava." So I go to the site where the chunks of unbroken street poked out into the hole like black asphalt teeth, and there below is a big pipe with bright red magma in tiny streams around it. The whole thing bore steam upward and it was hard to look. "I didn't know there was a volcano here," I said. He shook his head and replied, "we didn't know it either."

Whether this is some real natural disaster that's going to happen somewhere off the normal chain of volcano activity, in an urban setting, or not. I wanted to write it somewhere besides a journal at home.

I've also considered that it's a metaphor dream for the heated emotions of people who have allowed themselves to become too dormant for some to even believe they can feel. The under-current of people's anger swirling, like in that Ghostbuster's movie where the green sludge feeding off their anger, hate and pain.

I guess it's a wait and see game, now.