Have you ever had one of those dreams where something bad is happening, like a fire, and it seems so real that when you wake up you can’t shake the feeling that it was all just a dream? There is that fleeting moment between sleep and semi-consciousness when you can’t fully distinguish reality and you think there’s a very slight chance that what you were dreaming might actually be happening. Well, that happened to me a few weeks ago. Except after that bizarre moment of quasi-lucidity, the dream didn’t go away.
From somewhere deep inside the recesses of REM, I suddenly heard something very loud. My eyes shot open and all I saw was the pitch-black room with one brightly glowing orange rectangle flickering on the other side of the room. The bedroom window. Or rather, outside the bedroom window. But no, that’s not real. “You’re lying,” my groggy mind said to my eyes, still wide open and taking in the flickering blaze outside. I blinked, as if to hit a reset button in my brain. Still, the entire window glowed with that unmistakable dancing orange light. Was that an explosion I had heard? Finally my conscious brain kicked in and registered that we were no longer asleep. This was not a dream.
I flung off the covers and woke Ben. He seemed to go through the same second-long process I had to comprehend the situation. We both jumped up and ran to the window. My neighbor’s garage had burst suddenly into flames, right next to our house.
In all honesty, the rest of the story is pretty much what you’d expect when your neighbor’s garage spontaneously catches on fire. Ben got him out of his house, I called 911 and before we knew it the firemen had arrived, red and yellow lights flashing, with axes and hoses. People from nearby houses gathered on the sidewalk to watch despite the fact that it was 32 degrees and lightly snowing at 6:30am.
The thing I can’t get over is the surreal experience of half-consciousness, when one second seems to stretch on and on while my brain sputtered between stalled and overdrive. I can still see vividly in my mind that bright orange window with the flickering light, as if the image was burned there in a moment of unguarded impressionability. This much I can say, it was the strangest way I have ever been woken up out of a dream in my life.