The Cassandra Complex

I had the most extraordinarily vivid nightmare on Sunday night.

To put it in context, it was my last night of a week's leave before returning to work, and in the last week I was at work we had a toast-related fire alarm that smoked out one of the floors pretty badly (he really burned the toast quite well).

In my dream, I was in my work building - only it was a mix of my current and previous places of work, as happens sometimes in dreams - and there was smoke on the floor that I was on. I ran down to the foyer to operate the fire panel (I am one of the boss-type fire wardens).

Very quickly things spun out of control. My PA manner was excellent (of course!), but the fire was madly out of control. Four of the floors were quickly engulfed in a raging inferno - I could tell because the lights went out on the panel (it doesn't work that way; another bit of artistic licence on the part of my subconscious) - and though I thought most of the people had evacuated I couldn't be sure. The fire brigade didn't show up and when I called I spent ages on hold - and then there was a very condescending person who turned up and told me that they were all off on a training day and weren't available. I grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her.

In the meantime, outside it had grown very dark and a sullen orange colour, like the colour of the sky as it was during the Canberra firestorm in January 03. Very creepy.

The warden intercom phone rang and it was a guy I know from work, on the floor below the one where the fire started. He started to talk to me about inanities and I yelled at him to get out, but I knew somehow that the stairwells were impassable and it was futile. I told him, "There might be some smoke". What was I meant to say?

Then as things got worse the phone rung again, and I heard the sounds of a roar and an explosion that sounded like a gunshot, and a woman screaming. It was very Silent Hill-esque.

That was when I woke up.

I figure the dream was general anxiety about returning to work and the shiteload of stuff I had waiting for me, but it's really stuck with me. Yesterday when I saw the guy who made that first phone call, I felt the overwhelming desire to be nice, though, and every time I hear a door shut in the vicinity of the fire doors on our floor I twitch.

I hope the alarms don't go off for the next few days or I will jump out of my skin.