Mine was a bit disturbing. A lot disturbing. Spoilered for surprising violence.
I dreamed that I was a presidential aide – basically an assistant personal assistant, someone who helps schedule events and make sure the President’s pocket hanky matches his tie, that sort of thing. There was a gathering of luminaries and state officials someplace very pretty: it was a sunny day, there were sprays of flowers all around, the room was painted white with lovely large windows. Among the respected guests were one of my favorite professors from college and her husband – it’s not too weird that they were on my mind, since I still have contact with them and all.
Anyway: the party is starting and everything is beautiful and grand. Everyone is mingling, people are meeting the President, he is smiling and happy and everything is going smoothly.
Then the door opens and a dark-haired young man with an automatic rifle starts gunning everyone down.
It’s horrifying: there’s people screaming, there’s blood, there’s people crumbling to the ground. I watch the Secret Service diving, but they’re being shot too and the bullets get through; the President goes down. The First Lady falls. My professors are among the fallen. I grab a gun from one of the dead Secret Service agents and start shooting at the man in the doorway. I have the sense that there are other people attacking us, but when I hit this man I see him stagger backward and retreat. I make a mad dash for the door and slam it behind him, twisting the lock.
It’s quiet. It’s horribly quiet. I have a two-way radio that suddenly crackles into life; the person on the end is shouting, demanding to know what happened. All I can do is press the button and answer them: “They’re all dead.”
There is a flurry of activity as the cleanup starts. EMTs are everywhere, carrying people out on stretchers. I get to the hospital. I discover the President is alive as well as the First Lady. I discover my professor and her husband are also alive but gravely injured. I also discover that I am the only person alive who saw the assassin.
This is when I wake up.
I told Mom about the dream and she was pretty surprised before noting that actually taking violent action in a dream is unusual for women: violence tends to happen in our dreams and, possibly due to cultural conditioning, we usually try to avoid it in our dreams.
I also remember that I wasn’t afraid, at least, not when I woke up. I didn’t have that adrenaline rush you usually have after waking up from a horrible nightmare. It was sort of like being in an episode of 24, really. I wonder if I will have any more Jack Bauer dreams.