I just remembered
Aug. 4th, 2002 01:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynwhat I wanted to post about...
My brain occasionally pays me small courtesies in exchange for the right to freely drown me in weirdness. One of these courtesies is that, when confronted with something Very Very Bad, it does not give me the nightmare straightaway. It waits some time before processing the evilness and sending it to me as my nighttime entertainment. You guys know I served in Manhattan on 11 and 12 September; I had no ill dreams for months afterwards. The only dream I had of the Towers was some time ago, when I dreamed I walked around a corner in New York and came to the place where they had been. Last night there was another one, sort of...
I dreamed I was driving into New York to go to the museum, or possibly head to the RenFaire - I wasn't sure which, though it was most likely the Met, since I have no reason to approach Manhattan if I'm going to the RenFaire. And as I drove up a rise in the highway, I spotted smoke rising from the direction of the city skyline. Bad smoke. Thick, heavy, ugly black smoke, not just hazy smoke... I knew instantly that there was only one kind of smoke that looked like that. I gunned the gas, quickly coming to a part of the highway where cars were just plain stopped, and... well, the smoke was coming from the Empire State Building, which had been smacked into by two small planes, near the top. It was WTC-coloured smoke and just as heavy, despite the tiny size of the planes in comparison. All I could think to do in the dream was smack my steering wheel and cry out 'no, no, NO', because it hurt too much to think that we'd lost another one, another Big Part of the City, and so close to the anniversary, too...
The rest of the dream was a little more surreal, involving walking into the Empire State Building and finding everyone filing out through dark wood-panelled rooms in a very orderly fashion. There was stuff about meeting one of my co-workers, whom I normally find annoying, and finding her to be much more pleasant when we're actually doing disaster stuff instead of financial. There was stuff about security and being sent out of the building and about a zoo and a riverside park next door, and it all made perfect sense at the time, although I never understood why they were sending me away instead of letting me work on site. It wasn't a wake-up-screaming kind of dream, but a wake-up, stare-at-ceiling, hesitantly-ask-parents-if-news-report-mentioned-anything kind of dream. And, later, at least a somewhat entertaining one, since it featured an EMpire State Building situated next to the river (it's smack in the centre of Manhattan) in a park setting (it's actually surrounded by scores and scores of buildings) near a major highway (it's not) with a ground floor that looked like some 1920's hotel (miles and miles from the truth).
I guess what mattered to me was the fact that I finally got to do what I never let myself do, beyond a vague wish that I'd wake up and find the Towers falling was only a perverted dream: I got to have the reaction everyone else had. I got to have a moment of blind, desperate denial, of 'make this not to be!'. I'm not sure I ever got to do that with the Towers. Just a lot of staring, and saying, "Holy God. Holy Mary Mother of God." And clinging to the song "Miami 2017" as a sort of black humour. I never really felt I had the freedom to go into denial mode, because my job was to help deal with what happened and denial wasn't going to help anyone. I pretty much went straight to bargaining, anger, and all the other stages, but last night I finally got to cry out to the universe, "say that it didn't happen!"
Even in my dreams, that doesn't work. Ah, well.
My brain occasionally pays me small courtesies in exchange for the right to freely drown me in weirdness. One of these courtesies is that, when confronted with something Very Very Bad, it does not give me the nightmare straightaway. It waits some time before processing the evilness and sending it to me as my nighttime entertainment. You guys know I served in Manhattan on 11 and 12 September; I had no ill dreams for months afterwards. The only dream I had of the Towers was some time ago, when I dreamed I walked around a corner in New York and came to the place where they had been. Last night there was another one, sort of...
I dreamed I was driving into New York to go to the museum, or possibly head to the RenFaire - I wasn't sure which, though it was most likely the Met, since I have no reason to approach Manhattan if I'm going to the RenFaire. And as I drove up a rise in the highway, I spotted smoke rising from the direction of the city skyline. Bad smoke. Thick, heavy, ugly black smoke, not just hazy smoke... I knew instantly that there was only one kind of smoke that looked like that. I gunned the gas, quickly coming to a part of the highway where cars were just plain stopped, and... well, the smoke was coming from the Empire State Building, which had been smacked into by two small planes, near the top. It was WTC-coloured smoke and just as heavy, despite the tiny size of the planes in comparison. All I could think to do in the dream was smack my steering wheel and cry out 'no, no, NO', because it hurt too much to think that we'd lost another one, another Big Part of the City, and so close to the anniversary, too...
The rest of the dream was a little more surreal, involving walking into the Empire State Building and finding everyone filing out through dark wood-panelled rooms in a very orderly fashion. There was stuff about meeting one of my co-workers, whom I normally find annoying, and finding her to be much more pleasant when we're actually doing disaster stuff instead of financial. There was stuff about security and being sent out of the building and about a zoo and a riverside park next door, and it all made perfect sense at the time, although I never understood why they were sending me away instead of letting me work on site. It wasn't a wake-up-screaming kind of dream, but a wake-up, stare-at-ceiling, hesitantly-ask-parents-if-news-report-mentioned-anything kind of dream. And, later, at least a somewhat entertaining one, since it featured an EMpire State Building situated next to the river (it's smack in the centre of Manhattan) in a park setting (it's actually surrounded by scores and scores of buildings) near a major highway (it's not) with a ground floor that looked like some 1920's hotel (miles and miles from the truth).
I guess what mattered to me was the fact that I finally got to do what I never let myself do, beyond a vague wish that I'd wake up and find the Towers falling was only a perverted dream: I got to have the reaction everyone else had. I got to have a moment of blind, desperate denial, of 'make this not to be!'. I'm not sure I ever got to do that with the Towers. Just a lot of staring, and saying, "Holy God. Holy Mary Mother of God." And clinging to the song "Miami 2017" as a sort of black humour. I never really felt I had the freedom to go into denial mode, because my job was to help deal with what happened and denial wasn't going to help anyone. I pretty much went straight to bargaining, anger, and all the other stages, but last night I finally got to cry out to the universe, "say that it didn't happen!"
Even in my dreams, that doesn't work. Ah, well.
