It never occurs to you that the world will end at the most inconvenient time. We make our apocalyptic plans based on scenarios that include the people that we love or trust, resources that we imagine we’d have at our disposal after all of our careful stockpiling, without realizing that out of 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, the majority of that is spent either at work or sleeping. So unless you sleep with your ideal survival partner (come on, be honest), or work with the zombie fighting crew you’ve dreamed of, there’s a high statistical probability that you’ll be stuck in the end times with some of the least favorite and most useless people you know in a bunch of cubicles that can stop neither bullets nor waves of radioactive fallout, much less zombies.

This thought has crossed my mind several times - mostly when I am traveling far from the people I care about and I have the same recurrent but variable dream about the End of the World. It comes in slightly different forms and I am beginning to understand I have these dreams when I begin to feel isolated and distant from the ones who are important to me. Maybe the dreams are not literal prophecies about how the world ends, even though they are full of massive detonations, planes cartwheeling out of the sky and a sense of panic overriding the logic of everyone around me. Maybe the dreams are analogous to the helpless sense of not being able to immediately reach my family when I am somewhere remote and hard to get to, like Uganda or China or Alaska or the Zips on Market Street.

Last night I dreamt that I was on the South Hill in Spokane and something on the far northeastern corner of the city went up in a cataclysmic explosion that shattered windows across town. I knew I had to get across the river and to my house but when I reached the downtown area, the dam on the Spokane River had broken and a dozen or so small children playing along the banks in the floodplain were swept away while I stood, frozen in shock, with a handful of homeless people who chuckled hysterically at the sight. There was no way I could have reached the children before the giant wave, full of automobile-sized debris, did. I was helpless, and also cut off from getting to where I knew I needed to be.

Years and years ago I had a similar dream but I watched the mushroom clouds in the distance from the safety of some sort of a bunker with a weird assortment of friends… knowing that my family was out there somewhere, and most likely would not survive. We watched through a small slit window as giant airliners fell from the sky like rocks in a lake. The scene was eerily silenced by the thick walls of the bunker, but the screams echoed in our imaginations as we watched in total helplessness. Halle says I need to quit writing my dreams down in case they start to come true. I suppose I should quit dwelling on them, or cultivating them into sci-fi novels - as I am with the one where the entire planet is incinerated for the agrarian pursuits of an extra-terrestrial species (more on that later), but I believe I am supposed to interpret and understand why I see these things in my sleep, and even more importantly, why I remember every detail so vividly. There is something I am supposed to learn.

The biggest thing that stands out to me is the helplessness I feel in the moment of crisis. The inability to reach my children or parents or the other people I love. The isolation. Always in my dreams the paralysis I experience is followed by action of some sort. A solution to bridge the gap, or the flooded river, in the case of last night. But I wake up feeling impatient to begin the action now, proactively. Close the distance between me and my loved ones. Be ready. Build the bunker. Create the safety zone for the imminent alien attack (I think back in the last century there was shock therapy to treat this kind of thing). Maybe more importantly I need to be closing the gap between me and the people I love the most. Spending more time with them, in the right places. These dreams are just an opportunity to identify and solidify the relationships that really matter, to create rendezvous points, access routes and communication plans, both literally and figuratively, with the ones who matter.

These recurrent nightmares haven’t quelled my desire to travel yet, even though it may be all of the miles that trigger them. I am fortunate that when I am working so far from home, I’m usually with people who I’d definitely pick for my Zombie Fighting team. I’ve also carved my travel routes to include friends and family who could definitely hold their own in an apocalypse and that helps some. But the dreams certainly make me think through these choices. They make me more selective in my travel partners and the teams I work with. They make me conscientious of escape routes and backup plans for extrication. I don’t think I am paranoid, not yet anyway… just more deliberate, which isn’t the worst way to be.