GOING NUCLEAR

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I tend to remember bits of dreams.  This one must have had a beginning of some kind, but it's only the climactic end that I remember...

Ellie and I are at some major social event, at a rather splendid location--a restaurant? a ballroom?--with a magnificent view out over the Los Angeles basin.  It's not unlike the view from our own balcony, but, in the way of dreams, it's at once both striking familiar and utterly strange.  This vista, it seems to me, is flatter and broader than our own, where the Hollywood Hills are a prominent feature on the northern side...

There is a lull in the activity around us as we look out over the city and notice a huge cloud rising slowly in the distance.  It takes the eerie shape of a mushroom cloud but taller, more psilocybin than shitake (more phallic, then?) as distinct from the familiar image of the "mushroom cloud."

And yet... the word is soon spreading rapidly among the crowd: there has been a bomb.  It must be terrorists.  This is the moment we have all long feared.  We now see not only the cloud expanding skyward like a cumulous erection, but the radiation spreading downward in electric green-hued, ever widening, translucent and pulsating circles over the western part of the city.

Soon the streets below the balcony where we stand are filled, as though in a motion picture, with mobs rushing this way and that in fear, uncertainty and consternation.  After observing this scene of panic for a while, Ellie and I retire into a private space--a bedroom?--where we contemplate with remarkable calm the inevitability of the city's death, and our own.