I had a really bizarre dream last night. I will try to relate it "chronologically," meaning, in the order that I remember events, but anyone who has ever had a vivid dream can tell you this is utterly futile.

The first part involved meeting a carload of people I knew who had died in a car accident. For some reason, me and my live friends could see them and talk to them, a la "The Sixth Sense." Afterwards, my live friends planned on going to the crash site, which happened to be somewhere on the eastern portion of Michigan, just north of Detroit. We were, however, in Chicago, and because no one would be riding with me in my car, I didn't feel like it. Instead, I tried driving home to my apartment, but for some reason I couldn't read the street signs, and the landscape was markedly changed, to the point where I didn't recognize it. For one thing, there were hills, and anyone who has been to Illinois knows that there aren't any hills for hundreds of miles.

The next freaky thing, though, was that I realized that I had seen one of my friend in social settings prior, but after the car accident had taken place. Meaning that she had been dead the last time I had seen her, except that everyone thought that she was alive. I later learned in my dream that the only one who knew the truth was the driver in the car accident, who had, miraculously, survived.

Because I have been reading Philip K Dick lately, I recognized that my sense of reality was being shaken, with ramifications throughout spacetime. A "realityquake" if you will. (This is a concept that requires thought and articulation, but I will defer for now.)

There was much weeping and wailing. I still feel drained right now from all the crying I did in my dream.

Later on, I found that my now dead friend would show up in random places and would start talking to me, and other people could see her too, as long as they knew her well. That is, the clarity with which they could see her depended on how well they knew her. So people who didn't know her at all would just see me talking to thin air, while people who were as good if not better friends than I to her would see me conversing.

Finally, though, I stumble upon a newspaper clipping discussing the fatal car crash, and while the newspaper was printed in 1999, for some reason, it was referencing events in March 2005 (yep, not this incipient year, but the next one hence) as if 2005 was in the past. At that point, I had a "Back to the Future" moment where I began to suspect that I was caught in some time paradox, and I would need to travel through time to prevent catastrophe from occurring.

The dream began to unravel at that point, where I had a vague feeling that 1. I could've been the driver of the doomed car, if time and chance had worked that way 2. I was dead, and the people who I thought were dead were the ones who were alive.

I also began to experience dread when one of the "dead" would manifest themselves. Because sometimes it wasn't someone I knew, it would merely be vague shadowlike manifestations of people (and perhaps even things—think Cthulhu mythos) that I had scarcely known. (Shadowy like those creatures in the game "Silent Hill", if you've ever played it, that could disappear into the floor and then reappear, grabbing at your leg.)

It took me a while lying in bed, still drowsy, to sort through all this. Remarkably, it took me a while to accept the reality that, in fact, my friends were not dead, and it was all a dream.

Huh. I have some really complicated nightmares.