Several years ago, someone suggested we write about our dreams.  Here's what I just now dreamed.

The world was ending.  In the late 1900s, I worked for an "Incident Management Team" helping work on large forest fires, hurricanes, and rarely other disasters such as earthquakes, the attack in New York in 2001, and one incident I did not work, the space shuttle disaster.  In this case, we did not know how long we had to live, 20 days or 20 months, but it was not long and something had happened or was about to happen that was beyond our control.  We knew that human life was about to end on earth.  The disaster may have been an asteroid about to impact earth or a man-made calamity, such as nuclear war that had created unlivable conditions that were spreading over earth.  We did not know the nature of the disaster, but we had been told, as part of the Team, that we were preparing for the end of human life.

From that point, the story (my dream) gets strange.  A woman approached me and wanted me to go with her into a school.  She was like a school nurse, but said she wanted to give me some medicine related to the current incident.  She did not explain what it was.  After all, this was just a dream.  We went down a ramp, underground below the school.

Here, we found a roller coaster.  Like I said, this is a dream.  It does not have to make sense because I dreamed it.  It is just a dream.  We used heavy duty plastic trash bags to make a gondola and began to push it up the roller coaster track.  Yes, a wire was suspended over the roller coaster and we used that to make a gondola.  Our goal was to go to the top of the roller coaster and ride back down in the gondola.  An older man, much like Coronel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken, was helping us get past the forest fires along the roller coaster track.  This roller coaster was build on land, not like ones in an amusement park.

When we reached the top of the hill, three friends were waiting in the roller coaster to ride down the hill.  When they saw us, they knew the pathway was clear, and they rode down the hill in the roller coaster so they could now go do their jobs on the incident.  We decided to not wait for the roller coaster to return, but we would walk down the track ourselves.  I was a little worried we might be hit by the roller coaster as it wound back up hill.  But we were able to walk down safely.

As we got down the hill, I stopped to buy some ice cream. I was really dissatisfied with the ice cream because it had fake whipped cream (something I don't like) and was not well frozen and started to fall apart.  Very little of it was edible.  Near the bottom of the hill we met the man who made and sold the ice cream.  But I didn't tell him how terrible his product was.  After all, the world was ending and there was no need to give him a hard time.

At the bottom of the hill, I stepped back into the school. I was a few feet ahead of my wife and a friend of mine, who suddenly appeared in the dream for the first time, but seemed to have been with me all along. She was very upset because now there was a crowd of people and she was worried that we might get separated.  I have a bad habit of walking faster than she does in stores and getting separated, but I came from a family of nine children and getting separated was a normal part of life.  We all knew that we had to look for our parents when it came time to leave the store, so we would wander in our own directions while shopping.  My wife still finds this disconcerting sometimes.  Anyway, she was glad she still knew where I was.

Then?  I woke up.  Indeed, as best I can tell, the world is not ending in a few days after all!