War zone

Last night, I was in a war zone. An indistinct one, perhaps Kosovo, perhaps somewhere else.

I was among a group of observers who had come to this unnamed country to do something unspecified with the self-assurance that it would be obvious that we were not part of the "bad guys," who supported the war.

Our collective naivete became immediately apparent when we got caught in a crossfire. As we rushed into cars that were to drive us out of the war zone, I wondered about the mortars being fired left and right.

"How will it feel if the car gets hit? Will I be blissfully oblivious or will there be a split second of reckoning and pain?"

In my dream, my almost-nightmare, I hoped for the former.

In an instant, we were out of the car and running through the streets of a city, pursued by those who were intent on making war upon us, the innocent ones.

Homemade grenades were lobbed and, unbelieving, I felt one fall, as things happen in dreams, inside my shirt and through my skirt (now who gets into a war zone in a skirt, pray tell?).

I asked my husband, or perhaps someone else: "How long do I have to get this off me?" Then I thought, better stop talking and get it done fast. So I did and I threw the explosive back in the direction of our pursuers.

Another grenade was thrown our way but we left it behind, as we ran and ran, faster than I remember ever running in real life.

When I awoke, my heart racing, I was eternally grateful that instead of in a war zone, I was safe, besides my husband, in my bed.

A Dream Reader I knew long ago told me that the important thing about nightmares was not how scary they were but their actual outcome and the resulting feeling we are left with after they're gone. She taught me that dreams are the messages we send ourselves about our selves, in code, so deciphering them is important.

"If in the nightmare you face up to the problem and solve it, that's a good thing," she would say, regardless of how bad the dream had been. "It's when you're overwhelmed within the nightmare or you feel powerless that you need to pay special attention to what's going on in your life."

I guess everything is alright then because I handled the situation in my war zone as best I could and never felt that I couldn't deal with what was going on, however bizarre.

My friend TK tells of the strange dreams she had while writing her dissertation, including shooting one of her committee members with a tater tot. My war zone wasn't remotely funny, like that, but I'm going to read the dream as a subconscious vote of confidence and peg it on dissertation-writing time.

But the dream also works well as a perspective check to remind me that none of the challenges I might face can ever be compared to living in an actual war zone, like so many people in our planet do every day.