I am playing with some friends, and I am standing in the street near the curb. A huge blob of a car rounds the corner of my street, very near me. I think I am safe, but realize too late that I am being mowed down. I should have been more careful, because now I am dead. Just like that, I am gone.

But I am still there, sort of. I am thinking, and I am trying to look up from under the right front wheel. Mostly all I can see is pavement, but I can look up a little bit, if I strain, and see people's legs walking by. I know I will be here forever, under this car, wherever it goes.

The car has parked in the driveway across the street from my house, and I can hear my sister and my friends playing. Don't they even notice I am gone? Don't they miss me? Don't they care? This car just swallowed me up like a little bug, and life is going on as usual for everyone else. I don't even get to go to heaven or anything, I am just stuck under this car in a state of DEATH.

I know I can't wake up, because I heard that if you die in your dream, you really die, you never wake up. If you can wake up before you actually die, then you're okay. Like I've had dreams where I'm falling off a building, but I always woke up before I actually splatted on the ground, so I was okay. But this time it happened so fast that I couldn't do anything, that car just snuck up on me like something evil. I don't think the driver even knows he hit me.

Dying didn't really hurt, it iust felt like someone was holding me down, pressing me flat. It still feels like that, and I know it will for all eterniry. I am terrified. I can't believe my life is just... over.

I try to scream, but of course I can't make any sound, and this scares me even more. I close my eyes really tight and shut everything else out, willing it to go away, and I wish and wish and wish I could wake up. I don't want to be dead!

And I wake up!

--Carrie Elizabeth

EDITOR'S NOTE

A lucid nightmare? What a paradox! If you're aware you're dreaming, surely you'll take control of the dream, or at least prevent anything too horrible, right? Wrong. Not if you've been taught, as Carrie had, that death in a dream means death in reality. This pernicious bit of folklore is, obviously, false, or we'd have no accounts of dying in dreams at all--and a lot more deaths in bed! Yet the myth persists, and has real power--in Carrie's case, the power to paralyze. Just like the myths of gender, race, class...

--Wayan

SOURCE: First Person: True Stories by Real People (The Dream Issue), zine by Tracey West, (1995), p.10. Reprinted from zine Every Girl's Dream by Carrie Elizabeth; Salt Lake City, 1994?

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