In Dreams

they say you can't die in dreams, but i have several times. more often than not, it involves being bitten by a snake and dying from poison, which has happened in at least 3 dreams that i remember from my childhood. it's been a while since i've died in a dream, and last night it happened and it was one of the most vivid and realistic dreams i've ever had. notice that i say 'dream' and not nightmare because it wasn't particularly frightening, at least not for me. but when i actually woke up and everything, i seriously had to check to make sure i was able to move.

and the weird thing is: at first, i wasn't.

it took a few minutes, but i could move again. it was probably mental, but i seriously felt paralyzed to the point where i thought that i had died and 'resurfaced' in my room but i was actually dead. it wasn't the case, of course. it was a weird dream. christin was giving me a back massage and telling me to relax, and i made a joke about not relaxing and having a heart attack. right after that, like some kind of cruel irony, my heart stopped for no apparent reason. it was bizarre. then i got a kind of strange throbbing pain that pulsed quickly, then faded into a sharp constant pain. then it was gone when i woke up.

so yeah, i don't know if that's what a heart attack feels like, but that's what it felt like dreaming. the dream shifted from third-person to first several times, but until i was 'dead' it was first-person during all the pain. at the end, just before i woke up, it was third-person again and i could see christin fall on me in frustration and sadness. it was pretty miserable, but then she was next to me when i woke up and i realized i had been dreaming. technically, i knew i was dreaming all along, because of the location [out in front of my parents' house, 3,000 miles away in california] but yeah. weird.

oh, and in case you were wondering, my last thought before i died was: 'no, Jesus... i can't come yet... *pause* well i guess this is it.'