We got up at 4am Sunday morning to watch the meteor shower. We “ooh”-ed and "ahh"ed and shivered until the sun started coming up, then traipsed back to bed. I got back up a little while later and looked out the front window. The sky was dark again, which I thought was weird, since the sky had been getting very light earlier. I watched a few more meteors streak across the sky and then a 747 crashed a mile from my house.
I went outside as I felt another one hit the ground somewhat further away. As I walked across my lawn towards the crash I looked up and saw a jumbo jetliner pass silently about 150 feet over my head. I was still looking up at the meteors as I felt it hit the earth.
As I turned from the wreckage burning in the woods back towards my house I looked up and saw planes and meteors falling from the sky. I remember thinking to myself, “This is so horrible, it must be a dream. I’ll make myself wake up now.”
But I didn’t wake up. It just kept happening…
Of course, I did wake up eventually. My nightmare had long-since changed into some other dream, but the image never really resolved itself by the standard practice of waking up immediately and telling myself it was just a dream.
I hardly ever have nightmares (maybe once a year at most). But this was most assuredly the worst, most vivid one ever.
I know where it came from, too. The previous evening we’d finally watched our tape of the premier episode of 24. ((SPOILER!!)) A plane exploded at the end of that episode.
Earlier in the week, of course, a plane crashed in NYC. And before that was 9/11.
And watching the Leonids, I thought they looked like fireworks - just as close, only a few hundred feet in the air.
I guess I’ve finally had my 9/11-related nightmare. And no matter how often I tell myself it was just a dream, I have yet to rid my mind of the images. It felt so terribly, horribly real.