A Terrible Dream

I was dreaming about my 3 children again, estranged from me since the divorce 15 years ago, and the younger 2 were following me around, in their pre-teen forms, the same as the last time I had any association with them the year before their mother filed a stealth divorce petition after she took them out of town under false pretenses and refused to come back until I left the house (I "abandoned" it).  In my dream, although it has been 9 years since I have heard anything from any of them, and well over a decade since any Lamberton has had contact with them (typical PAS stuff), I had had a brief visitation with them shortly before that I remembered, feeding off a prior dream I had many months ago.

We were up on the local high school playing grounds.  I was walking slightly ahead of a tiny knot of little people and dogs, and Johnny and Danny were a small ways behind me.  I don't know where Jimmy, the oldest child, was, except that he was in the gym which we had just left to take a short walk outside.  We had rounded a corner around the bleachers and were headed back to the gym and the event inside it.

Somebody yelled out my name and hollered, "Run!"  As I looked up, I heard emergency klaxons sounding and the storm-tossed horizon above the gym was quickly filling up with fast approaching giant birds of prey, winging quickly towards the playing fields on a mission of destruction.  This was a deadly, imminent peril and people near the gym were running into it and safety.

I was 100 yards from the gym and I looked around behind me for my 2 children but all I saw behind me was a little dog.  The rest of the children had fled back behind the bleachers and, I supposed, were cowering underneath them, exposed to the depredations of the deadly claws of the giant birds.

If I ran straight for the gym I could make it there and get inside just before the predators arrived.  I was swept with indecision.  I knew I had to go back around the bleachers and find my children and try to protect and shield them from the death-dealing talons.  I stood rooted in my spot.  Already it was too late to get back to the gym.  My options were turning more and more fearsome for me.  I remembered the last visitation I'd had with my children a few months earlier, a short happy interlude.  But somehow, I argued with myself as the birds bore down on me, I know I haven't seen any child of mine in years.  I was remembering another dream within a horrible dream.

I forced myself to wake up rather than be destroyed by the airborne giant host as I ran to find my hiding  children.  As I lay in bed, in the darkness I could see dancing across the white ceiling a pattern of swiftly moving dark shapes, cast there by the dim light inside the display on my alarm clock,  projecting its customary blinking "12:00" because I never re-set it after the power last went out.  This was the source of the approaching birds of destruction filling the sky.

That was the worst dream I've had in several years,  I still remember it vividly days later.