A masochist is what I am. I know that eating anything spicy before bed is going to give me weird dreams and, like an undisciplined idiot, I do it anyway.

First dream was me getting into some sort of car wreck, which, in the dream, I had a moment of lucidity and realized ‘hey, maybe this is just a dream’ and forced myself to wake up. Looked at the clock – 2:25am. Gonna be a long night.

Next up…I’m at the shop, its dusk, and I’m standing in the parking lot loading a vehicle. Suddenly everything dies. The person helping me looks around and says “EMP”. We hustle down to the basement and there’s a television that’s still working. All the channels are showing the same emergency message about a nuclear detonation. All I can think is that I need to get back to my house and that I’m glad I had stocked up heavily early this year…but is it enough? Unlike many dreams I have like this, this one actually induced a feeling of fear and realism that I don’t normally get in these dreams. All in all, not a pleasant dream.

You know how when you cut off the head of a chicken the body runs around for a while or flops all over the place? The reasoning is that by detaching the brain, all those reflexes, muscles, and responses are now uncontrolled and they can suddenly run loose. I think dreams are like that….when your conscious mind goes to sleep there’s nothing to regulate the rest of your brain and you wind up with dreams about whatever you’ve been processing lately. But, I also think that dreams are the result of numerous minute observations and inputs we receive but unconsciously ignore during the day. Thats where that ‘sixth sense’ comes from… that feeling that something is awry. You unconsciously notice little details about things and your brain puts them together without you even being aware of it. Some of that goes into your dreams.

Anyway, I’m open-minded enough to think that perhaps my brain picked up some details about the world around me and thinks they might point to something like that. So…make sure everything is in place, just in case.

This post brought to you by chicken and Spanish rice with salsa at 10:30pm.

Pizza before bed. What was I thinking?

In the dream I was away from my house, and trying to get back to it. For some reason I didn’t have my vehicle and, for an equally unexplained reason, my Bag O’ Tricks was in that missing vehicle. So..there I am…trying to walk back to my house which, in this dream, is a good distance away and requires me to walk through a city.

In the dream, people are kicking in doors to other peoples houses to steal food, nowhere is safe, and there’s a general feeling of ‘every man for himself’. There’s one particularly nailbiting scene where I have to traverse a tunnel under a river as people drive through it at hellish speed, hauling trailers of belongings, and swerving all over the place.

The whole time I’m thinking that if I can get back to the house I’ll have everything I need. But…I have to get there first. I also recall thinking “why didnt I hide a gun and ammo somewhere out here?”

I finally get to a roadblock manned by someone I know. They let me pass, and then I wake up.

This is the first dream like this I’ve had in a while. But, it follows the trend of how these things usually go. I’m not inclined to believe that dreams are prescient , but I do believe that our unconscious mind can observe details in our day-to-day that our conscious mind doesn’t pick up and puts them together….thus giving us that ‘funny feeling’ we have about something.

So, first thing, I need to go through my Bag Of Tricks and make sure everything is cool. It would be a bit of a stretch to call it a GHB or something equally corny. It’s basically just a buncha gear that would come in handy in pretty much any unpleasant circumstance….everything from zip ties and batteries to multitool and Glock. It’s just something to tilt the odds back in my favor a little bit. But, it has come in handy a time or two.

No idea what the particular apocalypse was that kicked off the dream…there was one scene where a local power plant exploded in a cloud of black smoke and dust so I’m guessing it was something a little man-made but , really, it doesn’t matter.

Whats interesting is that, being a dream, the same emotions are instilled in you because you think whats happening is real. (Dreams are, after all, the first virtual reality environment ever made.) So if you wonder what that frantic, panicked feeling as you realize its The End will feel like…well, there you go.

I dont regret these kinds of dreams, they usually serve as a swift kick in the khakis to get me off my butt on preparedness things I may have been putting off. In fact, that may be why I had the dream…my subconscious may have been worrying about my lack of activity in that regard.

Any moral of the story for me to be aware of? Hmm..probably that if I think my Bag Of Tricks is useful enough to keep nearby it’s probably useful enough to clone and keep at an offsite location on one of my major travel pathways. I’ll have to think about that, but that really just falls into what another blogger would call ‘an operational cache’… which might be worth thinking about.

Also, no pizza after 9pm.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

When I was a kid, I could eat whatever I wanted and not have to worry about the effects it may have on my sleep. Now that I’m older I have noticed that if I eat anything with tomatoes (lasagna, pizza, etc.) before bed, I wind up having bizarre dreams. Sometimes I roll the dice and eat before bed and hope the dreams arent anything too weird. Last night was an interesting one.

I dreamed that I was in a pickup truck with my wife and my brother, driving along the main street in town. Suddenly, there’s a flash and all the lights in the buildings around us go dark and half the truck’s systems go down…dashboard lights gone, headlights gone, truck starts making weird chugging noise. I think a moment and say “EMP!”. Way off in the distance, miles and miles away, I see black (and I mean black) clouds boiling up into the sky and heading towards us. My first thought is unrelated weather phenomena but then in the distance I hear bells, like church bells, ringing in the far distance..dozens and dozens of them. And then it occurs to me that this is the sound of warnings of a great disaster. “This is it!”, I say as I turn the dying truck into the parking lot of the local supermarket. We get out and run into the store, each grabbing a cart. “What do we do?”, the wife asks. “Canned goods!”, I yell over my shoulder as I make a beeline towards that aisle.

Then, thankfully, I woke up.

I have these kinds of dreams from time to time. Sometimes its zombies, sometimes its a gunfight, sometimes its some disaster like this. But it’s always a bit stressful and something of a relief to wake up from. Usually it also spurs me into action on some neglected preparedness project I’ve shuttled onto the back burner. This dream will be no different, Im sure. I need to call the LDS cannery here in town and see if I can find a group to go up there with…there are a few ‘broken’ cases of #10 cans that I’d like to round out.

And no more meatballs before bed.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Im not hugely superstitious, I am a bit minorly superstitious though. Not really sure why. Anyway, ever have a dream that the next day makes you feel extra-cautious? You know, maybe you have a dream that tomorrow is the day L.A. slides into the ocean so the next day you pack a few extra items in your truck, or cancel some plans, or keep an ear glued to the radio “just in case”?

I had a dream last night that was like that but with a nice twist. If you can follow the convoluted description, it was a dream about having a dream. I dreamed that I had a dream where a nuclear device had gone off in some major city, complete with imagined footage of the events and everything. Then, a day after the nuking, there was a tremendous earthquake. In the dream, I woke up and discovered that, sure enough, there had been a terrorist nuking and the footage I was seeing on tv matched exactly the images I had had in my dream. Naturally, since I had dreamed about an event that had come true, the earthquake part that was soon to happen must be true as well, right? So I was furiously trying to grab some gear and get the heck out of dodge before the big quake hit. Of course, no one believed me that a cataclysmic earthquake would occur after we had just been nuked. I recall in the dream cleaning out a lunch counter of all their bottled water, stuffing it in my bag, and urging my companions to do the same. Weird.

These are the kinds of dreams you have when youre into this sort of lifestyle, I suppose. This particular dream doesnt affect me today. I have had ones in the past though that did make me put an extra magazine or two in my pocket before I left the house. More often than end-of-the-world dreams I have shootout dreams. These almost always follow one of several different themes:

• Bulletproof people – I see the bullets hit but they dont go down

• Missing/malfunctioning gun – frantically scrambling around looking for a working gun

Inadequate firepower – its WW3 and all I have is a 10/22

I’d say that covers most 90% of the ‘gun nightmares’ I have and from what I hear many people have them too. Those are the dreams that are more likely to make me drop one of the 33-rd Glock mags in my bag the next morning.

interestingly, every EOTWAWKI as I know it takes place during the event, never after. There are never dreams about six months, a year, two years after the event in some sort of post-apocalyptic setting. No, its always a frantic, hurried, desperate time of hurling supplies into the truck and yelling “We have to leave NOW!” It’s dreams like that that make me keep all our gear in man-portable containers and weights.

Anyway, just once I’d like to have dreams this vivid about something more pleasant for change….porn actresses, Megan Fox, that sort of thing.