When I was little, I had a recurring nightmare about sharks.

I was standing midway along the side of a huge olympic type swimming pool. In each swimming lane, different sharks swam the length of the pool, in alternative directions. Someone would push me from behind into the pool and I would frantically swim across desperate to dodge the oncoming sharks in each lane.

These days, if I have a nightmare, it usually either about taking a test I didnt study for, or it being the end of a school semester and I am way behind on homework. Partially this dream comes from the stress of returning to highschool after being out a month and a half or more recovering from mono. Luckily I've had this dream enough that I now only get partially into it and am able to say "Stop, this is only a dream" and shake it off.

This is clearly your mind trying to handle alien abduction

If any of you have read any of the Knight of the Word books by Terry Brooks, you'll understand more of this unusual dream I had last week. My dreams are often so vivid that when I wake up, I'm completely confused as to where I am, when I am, and what I'm supposed to be doing. That happened with this one.

***

I was a Knight of the Word. The world had crossed the precipice that the Knights have worked for centuries to prevent, and the Void was in the process of taking over by way of wholly corrupted people and mob violence spreading throughout the world. I had been toiling on with my duties since I'd been drafted by the Lady in my early thirties, and all that time was taking its toll on not just my body, but my psyche as well. I was tired. So very tired, all the time. Moreso than I should be at just over fifty years of age.

And lonely. That was the kicker; the life of a Knight of the Word is so lonely. In the course of my duties, I'd had to be apart from my loved ones for long, long periods of time. My duties took me around North America at completely unpredictable times. And my travelling had grown more extensive in the last decade, especially since the once-men and the demons had begun the open destruction of our civilization, forcing those in cities to band and retreat into improvised strongholds, and those in the country to band and retreat to out-of-the-way locations that wouldn't draw much attention.

But at this time, I had no current mission; there was no feeling of a place I needed to be, or work I needed to do. Instead, I had received a message from an old friend of mine, whose name managed to temporarily escape me. He was asking that I drop in to see him and a few of the others at a remote church in the Smokey Mountains in what used to be Kentucky. The church was now a shelter for a few local families to hide in and fend for one another.

It was only a few days, but when I arrived at the church, deep in the wooded hills of the Smokeys, my friend was there, and much to my surprise, so were two of my fellow Knights. I was even further surprised upon entering, as this was an occasion to startle me: many of my long-lost friends and family had gathered for a surprise reunion for me. For a long time, so many of them had failed to understand the path I'd taken with my life, but once the Void cast off any pretense of secrecy and made open actions against humanity, it became apparent to them the necessity of the oath I had taken and the duties that had kept me away from them so much. This was their chance to get to see me again and make me welcome among them in a way that hadn't happened for many years, and the emotional power of it overwhelmed me. They were risking a lot, gathering so many together for this, as the larger the gathering of people, the higher chance that demons would be drawn to them. This was why they had convinced two of my friends and fellow Knights to be here as well.

There were a few more people yet to arrive, including the woman whom I had intended to marry but had been forced to leave behind to carry out my oath of service. She had never married, but remained single and focused on time with her children and sisters instead. The one regret I had in the path I'd taken with my life, as necessary as I knew it was, was that I had left her. I had hated myself for it ever since, a self-loathing that burned in the pit of my stomach and ate away at me day after day.

I often wondered how my life would've been different if I'd turned away from the Word and not taken up my staff and served. But then I would think of all the lives I'd saved, and the difference I had made, however small, in staving off the day when the demons would completely overrun humanity, and I'd know that my happiness and hers were a small sacrifice in the grand scheme of things, no matter how much it had hurt and hollowed me out inside.

I both yearned and dreaded to see her again.

Unfortunately, I soon learned that the world was an even more evil place than I thought, and that I had taken a loss more personal than any other yet. One of the Knights delivered word to me that they had learned that a demon had attacked her and her sisters in their car enroute to this area, and they had all been killed. Sorrow and despair took hold over me, not anger. I had led them to this bitter end. My actions had brought even more hurt to her than before. I remained outside, sitting on the hill, preferring to be alone with my despair and leave the others to their comraderie.

When the demon found me, I was only surprised that I could not sense his presence. This was an old one, much older than any but a handful of the others. Most demons died through self-destruction or taking on greater risks than they should, and failed to reach an old age. Those who survived for long were possessed of a cunning far greater than most beings, be them human or demon.

I was gripped with indecision and fear as I realized that I was unable to summon the power I needed to fight him. He simply stood at the edge of my vision in the woods and watched me as I stood up. I slowly backed away, then hurried back to the church to find my fellow knights to see what we should do. However, the demon attacked, putting me immediately on the defensive, but I knew this was it: my time had come.

***

And then I woke up. It was a really depressing dream.

Do your dreams have a narrator or scrolling introduction text? That is alot of information packed into a single dream. Most of my dreams seem to only last a few minutes...though on occasion I have had dreams that seem to place me in some sort of adventure or movie. I really need to keep a dream journal...because they usually don't stay in my memory for very long after I wake up since those dreams usually wake me up in the middle of the night...then I go back to sleep and can't get back to the original dream, and by morning they are a distant memory.

I had a dream the other night where I was planning my strategy for riding all of the rides at this water park. In actuality, there seemed to only be 3, but I was very intent on devising the perfect plan. Which seems kind of silly, considering that the end of each ride was a splash pool that flowed into the entrance of the next.

Anyway, I finally get there and get on the first ride. It's a small boat of sorts, with 3 or 4 rows of seats. I sit up front, and this guy puts his young kid in the seat at the back. There's not enough room for him and his other boys, so he waits for the next car. The ride starts moving and the boat approaches a tunnel. A tunnel so small I have to tilt my head to the side in order to fit in it. And the tunnel is completely filled with water! Just as we enter, I wake up, rather disturbed.

I often dream that I am in a crashing plane. Often as not, I'm outside the plane on top of the wing or the fuselage. Sometimes I am with the plane until it impacts. Sometimes heaving turbulence will catapult me off of the wing before that and things will be quiet and still as I fall.

The most vivid dream I have ever had came to me in my youth, well before any Terminator or Mad Max movie, but maybe around Star Wars:

Friends and I were desperate to hide from some kind of cyborg who had treads instead of legs. We took refuge in the foundation of a ruined house on the beach near where I lived, but we were found. As the thing came over and down the cement wall, I fired a laser pistol at it. More accurately the pistol shot an invisible disintigration ray. The weapon was wholly ineffective against it, so I turned it on myself.

With my body gone, I found that I was still there in spirit. With a thought I turned the cyborg to scrap. I then began my way down the length of the beach, following a wall of large granite slabs between the beach and the road.

Before long I came across a sentient patch of frost on one of the slabs. It would not believe that I was a ghost, and certainly didn't believe that I could influence anything in the physical world. Just then, three small flying saucers which looked a lot like frisbees came overhead from across Long Island Sound. I willed them to crash and they did, right into the house of a childhood friend (sorry Chip). The frost was still unconvinced, a state of being quickly remedied when I melted half of it away.

I think the T-Rex from your dream, Puce, ate me in a dream once. It didnt hurt as bad as I thought it would but apparently you can't feel pain in dreams. I've felt what you could call extreme discomfort before, but I can't remember ever feeling actual pain.

I dreamt in anime once. Kill Bill style (ninja scroll style?) I wasnt a participant and I didnt dream from the perspective of being aware of watching a movie, it was more like just watching a movie where you're into it enough that you're not aware of your surroundings or the objects surrounding the screen, all that exists is the screen. I remember that it was cool, but I dont remember what it was about.

I think the most pressing matter in most of these dreams is, are any of these dreams in full color?

That's so very similar to how I dream, except I've always felt mine were more like a documentary. I can see myself, and there are cameras on booms that sweep and swing all around the action.

My favorite happened years ago in high school. The dream starts with a shot of the back of a semi trailor rattling at 5 mph down a dirt road. The tailgate is open and sweaty men are pitching bags of lettuce and corn chips out the back to robed, dusty skinny people with hands outstretched, fighting over these Sam's Club size portions. The camera pans to the right and the side of the semi truck which clearly reads "Taco Bell Ethiopia".

Scene change to what I assume to be the inside of the Taco Bell Ethiopa branch warehouse. Here a very nice woman sits at a table, Indiana Jones' warehouse behind her. She has a swing-arm scale on which she is trying to prove to me that all the feathers on a chicken weigh just as much or more than the antlers on a chicken.

The dream ends with my perspective changing. I'm an Ethiopian and I've just stopped running after the truck. My dirty little hand rises to my mouth as the semi dissappears into it's own cloud of dust. I have a scrap of lettuce that I begin to chew.

It took me until the afternoon of the next day to realize that chicken do not, in fact, have antlers.