Like most people, I've had dreams about my own demise. Usually via car crash, and since in waking life I'm a good driver and a trusting passenger, I've always assumed the car accident dreams are prophetic. More significantly, though, I've dreamed about the end of the world, repeatedly, for as long as I can remember.

Nearly every possible form of apocalypse has played out while I slept. It's no big mystery why my subconscious would linger on this subject (see Dogma). But just in case I possess an ability to see the future, and like the car crash dreams these too are visions of the future, let me prep you for several scenarios.

Flood
This is one of the early apocalypse dreams. In this, my father and I climbed into the rafters of the attic well before the water level reached the third floor. He was also able to rescue a small Asian child. We were going to be ok somehow. So if another Great Flood comes to cleanse the earth of evil, head for high ground, you'll be all right.

Meteor
The sky was dark gray, filled with smoke, and every house in the neighborhood was on fire as flaming rocks continued to plummet from space. I wandered around, lost, looking for any sign of life. It was a bleak apocalypse indeed.

Pandemic
In this dream there was a contagious disease that was poised to wipe out the population of the world. There was a handy way to diagnose, though: you filled two glasses with a certain liquid; one was a control, the other contained some of your DNA, and you dropped a stone into each. If the liquid in your glass turned green, while the other stayed clear, you were done for. I didn't make it, folks.

Nuclear Winter
Ah, the worldwide nuclear attack. Out of all the apocalypse dreams, this one's the American apple-pie-and-baseball apocalypse dream. In my vision, I was on the beach at night when my mom came frantically looking for me and told me to get in the car. She was driving a pickup with a bed full of bottled water and told me "they" had nuked us. She was taking my siblings and me to my grandmother's house in Connecticut, which idea I violently resisted. I mean, Connecticut?

Thunderstorm
Everyone was holed up in an elementary school for shelter, cowering under the little desks as a massive storm raged the night sky. In this particular weather pattern, lightning was a harmless precursor to destructive thunder; the intensity of the lightning indicated the severity of the next thunderclap. There was a flash of lightning that illuminated the sky in a blinding blue-white, and lasted for a full minute. In this end-of-the-world scenario, we're all completely fucked.


Wait! There's hope.

The New World
I also once had a dream in which I was gazing at the Earth from a distance, and as it turned it was revealed that there was a whole portion of the planet we'd yet to discover -- a sort of benign tumor of untouched terrain. Just think, thousands of square miles of natural resources we haven't even found yet. It could happen.