The Flash

I'm reading Douglas Coupland's Life After God for the first time, and I'm at the part about the nuclear dreams with the flash, and how it always comes from the south.

And so I think back to all the dreams I've had that have ended in a nuclear flash. I've had a lot. And of the dreams that actually ended with the flash (and not just the buildup to the flash), I can only remember one that was set in a location from my actual life where I would be able to gauge direction. And yes, the flash came from the south.

In it, I'm out on the front porch of my parents' house. It's spring or summer because the green is robust. Out of the south, the sun grows. Everything freezes but there's some kind of sweeping wind, and I can't breathe or move. In all of these, it's like the life is just sucked out of everything. I always wake up just before I die in the dream, but sometimes it's a close call.

When you are young, you always expect that the world is going to end. And then you get older and the world still chugs along and you are forced to re-evaluate your stance on the apocalypse as well as your own relationship to time and death. You realize that the world will indeed continue, with or without you and the pictures you see in your head. So you try to understand the pictures instead.