bad dream

Two nights ago, I had a dream where a car crashed into the car I was driving.  It seemed like a moderately bad crash - but one from which everyone walked away..  In the real world, I've never been in a really bad crash.  A couple fender benders back in the day...and once I was a backseat passenger in a car vs. road barrier where one passenger broke his wrist against the windshield...but again, everyone walked away (except the car, which was shot.) 

Last night I had an extremely vivid dream where a plane crashed on the road in front of me.  It turned into a special effects artist wet dream, with the parts of the plane flying past me (some times in slow motion), tearing my car apart around me while I sat there.  Again, I walked away.

When I was a kid, I had lots of loopy dreams about Clint Eastwood hunting me down and of Mel's Diner in the middle of a forest and of my family turning into Seamonsters (of the Sigmund variety.) I dreamed almost nightly back then.  But these days, I don't dream as often.  At least, I don't remember dreaming.  So, now, when I do and it's this vivid, it's kind of a jolt.

To have back-to-back dreams where I survived a crash/disaster seem noteworthy.  My dreams are extremely transparent.  Abe Lincoln doesn't play checkers with a beaver (although, I would dig that the most.)  They are fairly run-of-the-mill: falling, helping someone in distress, being chased and the much too occasional sex dream where I the alarm goes off right before I get to.  Fucking alarm.

More than representing some kind of goal or painful experience that I'm at odds with (like the online dream interpretation site might lead me to believe), maybe, I just can't stop thinking about the friend of a friend whose parents both died at this crash, not two weeks ago. 

Awful.  Both parents, gone in an instant.  I can't imagine how world-spinning and earth shattering that news would be.  It's so horrid that my brain seems to want to find something good, something positive.  That they went together. That they left a family who loved them, who'll mourn them. That there will be no long-suffering drawn out illness. No physical pains.  No meds that cloud their minds.  No humiliating need for someone to bathe, feed or dress them.

I don't believe in an afterlife.  I think this is the one shot you get.  And nobody is guaranteed a full century, so you better make the most of it while you can.

Carpe diem, my REM feasting grey matter.  Carpe diem.