Bigger Than A Train Wreck

I had an upsetting dream last night. Typically when I have dreams, whatever happens in them can be traced back to some concrete reality from the previous days before I had it - just with a bizarre twist to it. Like, say, I drink a can of soda in real life (unusual for me) and then I'll have a dream about drinking a can of soda and blowing up like a balloon and floating off into the sunset. Or, I'll watch a documentary about Kennedy's assassination and I'll have a dream about jump-roaping on a grassy knoll - in Thailand. Totally bizarre.

But last night I had one that I can't seem to trace back to anything concrete from the past few days, but that I know for sure is symbolic of how my life is going lately. In it, a space shuttle had just launched and I was watching it from a high floor in a high rise building. People were cheering and in awe as they craned their heads skyward to watch it disappear into the atmosphere. As it got further into the sky, but still quite close to earth, there were suddenly orange flames flashing out from the bulbous nose of the spacecraft that quickly made their way on down the rest of the body of the shuttle, swallowing it until it was engulfed and coming apart. The separate pieces were falling to the earth onto the busy street below the building I was in and crashing into cars and greedily swallowing those up in flames as well. I looked up and the largest shuttle piece remaining was hurtling towards earth and I watched as it crashed into a building across the street and exploding causing utter and total devastation. I knew that in that second and the ones before, many people - innocent, good people - were killed, or maimed or burned. That their lives were destroyed or forever altered.

It seemed so real in my dream, so vivid, that I woke up from it thinking that I should turn on CNN to get more information about what was happening. Then, as I became more awake, I realized that it was just a dream but then I instantly realized somehow that that space shuttle bursting into flames and destroying so much around it was a clear symbol of my life at the moment. I started crying. That space shuttle was me and it fell apart and by falling apart it hurt what surrounded it - it hurt people's lives by not holding up and doing what it was supposed to do. By not being stronger. Something inside, deep within its being - a faulty wire, a weak bolt, a crack in the metal innards - gave way, and tipped the shuttle over the edge of what it should have been able to accomplish and manage until it just exploded and fell apart, taking down many others with it.

I, and my life, are way beyond a train wreck. We're an exploding space shuttle.