Worse Than the End

I have nightmares about the world ending periodically.

It's different every time, but they tend not to be the kind of world-ending situations that you see in books or movies. They're about reality failing, the laws of… well, the laws of everything ceasing to work.

The one I still remember most vividly even years later, it was one I couldn't stop, and everything was just… slowly falling apart. I remember when words just stopped working and I lost the ability to read and the panic and sadness I felt were so raw that it stuck with me.

Last night's dream was one where I kept repeating it when I "failed" and the situation became more complicated every time. At first I thought I was just trying to fix one bad situation, where I got shot, and when I managed to make everything go smoothly so no one got killed, it just… kept rolling forward to a more complicated situation, and eventually it was about understanding different kinds of magic, and the songs that kept the universe from falling apart (the only ones I remember were on the Bat Out of Hell II album by Meatloaf), and I had to solve riddles but every time I went through of course I could remember the answers from the previous times and it got so weirdly boring.

Boring apocalypses suck.

As I was going through I was also constantly worried about where my spouse was, where my kid was, were they okay, if they weren't with me, where had they gone, over and over. Finally my spouse and I got in to some side dimension and were able to stabilize everything and it was safe, yay, etc, but when we came out it turned out time had been different in there and we'd been gone two and a half years. We were able to be reunited with our kid almost immediately and she seemed fine? She'd missed us but she had been with a foster family that was apparently really nice.

And then she said something about Jesus and I just… recoiled in horror, in the dream. It was like my kid had been replaced with a pod person and I didn't know what to do.

That was when I woke up.