Nuclear Apocalypse

This dream I had back when I lived in Toronto, years before any thought of moving to Vancouver had crossed my mind. I've thought of it a lot since coming to BC in 1999, and especially since the wages of greed came home to North America in 2001.

Here's what I dreamed: I am somewhere in BC, living in a little cottage-like house, when nuclear war begins. I hear about the approaching disaster on the radio, and then a few minutes later, the ground shakes with a subaudible "whump!" I look out my window and see two fiery mushroom clouds, one to the south and one to the east. Immediately, I start thinking about what to do and where to go, and as I get myself organized, black billowing clouds of smoke start speeding through the sky overhead. A neighbour comes by, a man who doesn't speak at all, and we drive into town in his pickup to get supplies. On the way in to town, we run into a crowd of well-dressed young people standing around their SUVs on the road, strutting about arrogantly, talking and laughing at the tops of their lungs and making plans to go and get drunk, as if nuclear war were a sporting event. Then when we get into town we encounter several people who are walking around in that frighteningly unpredictable state where they are struggling to behave "normally" while inwardly they are losing their minds. My neighbour and I look at each other and communicate without speaking our amazement at people's reactions to events, and once we have bought the water, radio batteries etc that we need, we bail out of town and hop a boat to Vancouver Island, the likeliest place I could think of to survive the war.

Edit: 2004: A few years after moving to Vancouver, I did in fact see my dream image of nuclear bombs going off near the city - on the SciFi Channel. Prophetic, eh! Image from Battlestar Galactica.