Dreaming Drones
I suppose it was inevitable, still it caught me completely off-guard.
I suffered a lot of nightmares as a child and even through my college years. Just ask my college roommates. I’m sure I’ve been the talk of their dinner party laughter for dozens of years now.
That was that particularly bad time at Oregon State University where I started having night terrors. My poor roomie had a time. The screaming always woke her, but surprisingly, not me – the one doing the screaming.
The night terrors started in October, but we didn’t find out until March that the source of the night terrors was a real terror.
Our landlady had been corresponding with inmates at the nearby State Penitentiary. After one particularly bad night terror, we discovered a ladder leaned up against my bedroom window. It was a large window and my bed was pushed up against it. The theory is that I saw someone outside the window in my half-awake state and thus, the night terror that woke everyone. I hope whoever was on that ladder peed his pants and got burn marks from running home in wet breeches.
But if you had told me when I was a college coed that I’d suffer nightmares from drone attacks, I would have likely responded, “Huh?”
The only kind of drone we knew back then was the sound the TV made after it signed off the air following the Johnny Carson Show.
Sure enough, though, I’ve had my first drone strike nightmare.
I was at home, of all places. Minding my own beeswax, when all of a sudden a drone broke through the bright blue sky aiming straight for me.
I was a goner.
Obliterated.
Wipe-Out.
I didn’t have time to run, hide or scream.
They say you don’t dream your death.
Perhaps the people who claim that had never dreamed up a drone.
But, then again, drones are a living nightmare for some.
Karen Spears Zacharias is author of After the Flag has been Folded (William Morrow).
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