The way out of a terrible dream is to take a stand
For much of my life, I had a recurring nightmare about tornadoes.
I don’t remember the first time I had the dream; it’s possible that I was a child, but it seems more rooted in adulthood. Certainly I have had it, on and off, for decades.
The dream goes like this:
I am running from a tornado. Not once have I jumped in a car to flee, or boarded a train or boat or plane. I have to outrun it myself.
I am out in the open and know that I need to find cover. As the tornado bears down on me, inevitably I run into a house. I head for the basement.
The storm roars. The house begins to come apart all around me. The roof disappears, the walls break apart and fly away. I cower in the basement until the storm passes, and then emerge
from the rubble to see the sun shining. I made it.
Then, on the horizon, I see another tornado approaching. Sometimes there are dozens in the distance.
The details will vary: Sometimes there is no basement. Maybe I next run into a barn or a garage. Maybe I am alone or other people run beside me.
But the bones of the plot don’t change. Always it is run, hide, survive. Repeat until I wake up.
Several years ago, I stopped having the dream. I thought that maybe I’d grown better at coping with some inner turmoil, but who’s to say? Whatever the reason, I was glad to be rid of it.
The nightmare came back on Sunday night with a new plot twist. This time the threat was not a natural disaster but a man-made one. This time the threat was violence.
I remember only pieces of it. It began in an office building, and though I don’t recall witnessing any acts of violence in the dream, instinctively I knew why everyone ran for the exits.
But I couldn’t find the way out. At one point I was inexplicably back on the top floor of the building, having to wait to take the elevator all the way down again, not knowing if a killer was onboard already or waiting for me when the doors opened on a lower floor.
Somehow, though, I made it out. I was walking in the street with another reporter from the newspaper. We both had survived the same violence, and we carried armloads of firewood to heat our homes.
Then the dream jumped. I was in front of my house. (But you know how dreams work: It was my house, but it wasn’t my house.) It was after dark, and street lamps only weakly illuminated my surroundings.
If you’ve ever been to Pittsburgh, picture the tight hills of the older suburbs, but make the front lawns of each house about two acres from the front door down to the winding street.
Again, I knew intuitively that there had been a killing of some kind. A young woman I didn’t know and her two small children were with me. Whatever had happened, we had escaped.
It was Halloween. We watched as the police investigated, their cars passing on the street below. I told her children, a boy and girl, that they were in luck because it looked like they would get all my candy.
Then they and their mom were gone. I was in a packed arena. It was loud and lights flashed as they might at a concert.
Something terrible was happening. I sat with four other people. I did not recognize them as my family, but maybe they were. Some monstrous contraption rose from the center of the arena. It reminded me of a blimp. An amplified voice instructed us to remain seated, and doors to various bays opened in the side of the blimp.
Whoever manned the blimp began firing rotary machine guns with multiple barrels into the crowd. It was horrific, and my dream self knew that I was not going to escape this.
I didn’t run. I closed my eyes, told the people around me that I loved them and waited for the end.
And I woke up.
I’m a lucid dreamer, so it might be more accurate to say I woke myself up, as I seem able to do when a nightmare really goes south on me.
The clock read 4:46 a.m. Monday morning, still dark.
Where had this dream come from? Sometimes I can’t figure that out, but this time the source was not a mystery.
I had read about the continued violence in Columbus over the weekend, and both read and watched the news about the latest acts of violence in Chicago, Austin and elsewhere. I had talked about it at dinner with my wife and daughter.
For a while I lay awake in that disoriented, morose state that follows a truly bad dream. Then I thought about another story I’d read on Sunday, about a rally for peace outside a Near East Side barber shop.
Organizers said they hoped at the very least for a pause in violence on the approaching Juneteenth, the June 19 celebration of the day in 1865 when Union soldiers arrived at Galveston, Texas, with word that the Civil War was over and that slaves had been freed.
“As a community, we want things to get better,” said Al Edmonson, owner of A Cut Above the Rest barber shop.
“We have got to take an increased stand against what’s happening in our neighborhood,” said Charity Martinking, president of the Columbus chapter of the National Pan-hellenic Council. “It’s unacceptable here in this community, and enough is enough.”
That is the only way to make a waking nightmare end, I thought. We come together, dig in our heels and make our stand. Instead of running from the storm, we lean into the wind. tdecker@dispatch.com @Theodore_decker