I dreamed last night that I was working in a high-rise office again. Everyone was in a panic because a tornado was visible from one of the windows. We were looking for a place of refuge inside the building. I found a white-painted two-panel wooden door.
Downstairs, everyone was pouring out of the office building into a candy store across the street. The candy store was an old one-storey structure with canopies and fruit stalls in front of it. As we crossed the dirt street (It hadn’t even started to rain yet!), I asked someone why we were all running into the candy store. “It has a basement,” he yelled. Then he shoved his hat down tighter on his head and ran.
“It’s dropping!” someone nearby yelled.
I turned and got my first good look at the “high rise.” It covered about half a block and stood three stories tall. It was cased in stone and a short, square minaret graced each corner—they looked more like battlements, but minaret is what I remember thinking of them as. Centered between the two visible minarets and about a quarter mile beyond the building, a tornado snaked down from a slate cloud. I woke up then. My heart was beating fast, but it wasn’t racing like it has been after several less eventful dreams lately. I remember thinking that at least I had a reason for an elevated heart rate.
Another odd thing about this dream is that the perspective was different. I was shorter in the dream than I am in this life. Could it be a memory of a past life? If so, it wouldn’t be the first such for me. Or is it more likely to stem from reading a book in which the main character remembers glimpses of past lives? There’s no way to tell.
I have had a number of dreams lately (undocumented here) that were no more threatening than the one about Rose breathing. I would awaken from these dreams with all of the symptoms on an anxiety attack—that is, all the symptoms except for anxiety. As an experiment, I stopped drinking diet soda for a few days, and they seemed to abate. Too much caffeine?
