Fear Death By Water

I've just emerged from one of those dreams that seem so intensely terrible that you can't imagine experiencing something so traumatic and not going insane, and then you wake up, and what a relief. In the case of this dream, the world is coming to an end. Big, terrible, cinematic: a great flood, covering the earth with water - or, in the focused perspective of this particular dream, covering San Francisco with water, slowly, as others and I look for high ground in the hills of "the city that knows how." (Of course, given the current political climate, what better city to be annihilated by flood?, what better way to announce the coming Rapture?, except, of course, to note that flood won't be the instrument of God's wrath the next time around [cf. James Baldwin: "God gave Noah the rainbow sign - no more water, the fire next time!"], so other forces must be at work, possibly global warming.) And there were elements of the dream that seem fantastic, improbable, silly: did I mention that King Kong was in the dream, tearing the support beams out from hilly condos that people had come to for protection (the bastard!), even as the rain continued to fall? And it's not immediately clear why anyone would stay in San Francisco under such circumstances (you know - Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay and all that) instead of taking a quick drive to the Sierra Nevada, but I guess part of the logic of the dream is that you would want to die in a place you love, so why not here? But amid the (after-the-fact) silliness, moments of real horror: seeing water engulfing cars trying to reach higher ground, witnessing scenes of water filling the dining room of one family trying to stay alive, until they've been totally subsumed by it. And in one of those crazy moments of dream editing, I find myself removed from a safe location (the highest condo in San Francisco! With shatterproof windows, to keep all those suckers out!!), to suddenly find myself in the car of some frantic aunt who was feeling too hungry, and decided to leave the condo to get a bite to eat, taking several of us with her, but later regretting the decision, no doubt discovering that no reasonable mom-and-pop store would be open at a time like this. So she and everyone else in the car (except for me, apparently) perished. (I know it's a truism of dreams that you never witness your own death, but it's quite dispiriting to watch the deaths of those around you, over and over again.) I can't say what might have motivated such a dream, except, maybe, mixed feelings for having to kill a mouse last night, my first since moving to New York, and it wasn't quite dead when I put him in the garbage, but presumably on the way there after eating the poison pellets that I left out for him, lying mostly impassive and immobile as I scooped him into the plastic bag that would become his mausoleum. Is there a more humane way to kill a mouse? Is there a more humane way to kill? Who knows. But that question was no doubt with me when as I witnessed the destruction of my favorite city, and the wrath of King Kong as he tore the support beams from those condos.