Dreams of War

Just woke up from a dream that was frightening - it wasn't the fact that it was terrifying but rather the relative scale of the destruction and the fact that it unfolded before my eyes and the consequences it meant for each moment after it occurred. I myself was a child in the dream, maybe about 12, but I was not in the house I grew up in. I was in a house more similar to the one I live in now with a view of the harbor. This view would normally be the welcome sight of swaying palm trees and rolling waves but this time there was a warship positioned a few miles out. I stood there marveling at the massive hulk of metal though from my view it appeared no larger than a toy - but that realism was the horror of the scene, the fact that this did not seem like a movie where the camera was right up close to action. I could hear the news on the TV blaring in the background, sounding off the play-by-play of the subtle event that started simply with a transport helicopter flying around the warship. In the next moment I could see smoke perforating through the helicopter in rapid succession followed by a black billowing cloud that trailed the helicopter as is tipped forward then twisted down to the water below. As the rotor blades hit the sparkling blue they crumple and thrash in the fraction of a second before the whole mass just belly flopped into one big splash. But before any question of consequence could wash over me I could see puffs of smoke silently pop from the warship followed the sound of distant thunder and then that was followed by an even louder boom and grumble that was certainly the exploding target of the warship's massive gunfire. I couldn't see what was being hit but from the sounds I could tell it wasn't far from where I was. I could hear the crazed yelling of the news reporter from the television down stairs. Then the screams of fighter jets above. But the next onslaught wasn't from these jets, it was from a projectile that seemed to have been launched from under the water. It was like a snake that struck just above the water then it smacked into the warship just above it's hull. What followed was a spectacular explosion that finally made be flinch as the whole center of the metal monster of a boat just burst backwards then crumbled into smaller pieces as if the ship was made of Legos. What was left of the front and rear just seemed to flatten and melt into the harbor, a mass of debris would be the only trace that a warship was ever there. And then that wash of consequence came over me as I ran out of the room - the world, the one I knew, was no longer movies and video games. As I raced down stairs, following the frantic reporting from the TV, I called for my parents and my sister. But when I got to the living room it was empty except for the television with the news replaying the very events that I had witnessed with my bare eyes. The dream didn't end there, I actually ran back up the stairs and would find my sister on the phone. But in that moment of standing in that empty living room I thought that some invisible force from the blast might have evaporated my family (remember in my dream I was only 12) and that I was the only person left on the planet. It was a chilling sadness that that sucked itself into a hole in my heart and I felt my knees weaken. In this case I was able to escape by waking up, but the fear is always that next time there will be no escape.