Under Attack

A couple of nights ago I dreamt, not surprisingly, about the group of people I spend every day of this program with. In this dream, however, we were located in Durham on Duke’s campus when we received warnings from the government that the U.S. was going to be bombed, beginning with the east coast. At this point, the program immediately made arrangements and we were evacuated to a house on a farm in California. I remember we took a bus over and there was a general sense of impending doom and the instability of the future. In the process of evacuation I forgot to call my house at home and let them know what was happening. I called my mother from my cell phone as soon as I remembered but the lines were completely jammed, and then my phone died. When we arrived on the farm in California we were greeted by an older woman who owned the house. She was trying to put on a smile and welcome us into her home with as much hospitality as she could muster, but even she couldn’t hide the despair in her smile as we walked into her house. We spent the day eating her homemade food and she tried to keep us occupied by making crafts. At some point my friend in the program reminded me that I should probably call my mother and I did. I told her where we were, told her we were OK, and oddly enough my mom seemed incredibly despondent. All I got from her were curt answers like “yes” and “OK then” and she seemed to have completely lost any emotion as her way of coping with what was going on. I got off the phone and finally began to feel horrible, even though up until that point I had been trying to laugh things off and be the joker in the group. It was interesting to see the different ways people were dealing with the panic – at some point we went to a theme park near the farm run by a family that had decided to continue living as if everything was fine, and they opened up the park and were charging half price for the entrance. We tried to enjoy the rides but we were not able to rid ourselves of the tremendous anxiety. The dream ended there, stuck wondering how it would all turn out.