I was in a tunnel. Something had happened. People were everywhere, cars stopped, nobody was leaving. Some people were hurt, others were in a panic. Homeless people who lived there were angry because their home was suddenly crowded. I tried to wake up but I would keep going back to the same dream. So I decided to accept it.
I was basically traveling between dreams. Waking up, going back to the same one. Not arriving anywhere, not leaving anywhere, just moving. Sometimes I was a character. Other times I was just watching, floating above it like a camera. But there was a direction. Something pulling. I didn’t know what it was or where it led, only that I was supposed to get there. Sometimes there were clues. Other times I was driving. The strange part was that I wasn’t alone in this. Everyone else was going there too.
I felt like I was getting closer to my destination. The space around me started filling up. Not with crowds exactly but more like a gathering, the kind that happens organically, where people show up without being invited and yet somehow everyone belongs. The beings around me were the most interesting I’d ever seen, and I use “beings” deliberately because some of them weren’t exactly humans. A lot of them felt familiar. Not in the way you recognize a face from work, more like the way you recognize a song you haven’t heard in years, something deep in the chest going: oh, you. Some of them I could place clearly from my own life. Others I couldn’t name but knew anyway, the way you know things in dreams, which is to say completely and without evidence, only knowingness.
We all arrived at the place. It was a highway. Long, flat, made of asphalt over green fields, cut out of the landscape. I couldn’t see where it ended in either direction. Behind me was a tunnel, the mouth of it pitch dark. Hills rolled on the sides. The sidewalk was wide and clean, and vehicles were parked all along it, not in a traffic jam, just stopped, abandoned gently, like the drivers had simply decided to get out and stay. People were everywhere: on the grass, on the road, leaning against cars, sitting on hoods, talking. No one was driving or going anywhere anymore. The world had pressed pause to let everyone meet.
I noticed the smoke first. On the horizon, a thick gray column rising in a near-perfect cylinder, the kind of shape that looks too organized to be natural. I pointed it out to someone next to me without thinking, and suddenly everyone was looking. For a second it was just smoke. Then it wasn’t.
The column widened and shifted, gray becoming orange becoming something between red and violet, the smoke eating itself and becoming fire, the fire becoming a blast that climbed and bloomed and spread across the sky in pulses of purple light. It looked exactly like a firework. A massive, terrifying, genuinely beautiful one in a classic mushroom shape. People around me made sounds of wonder. Some of them started walking toward it. Others were scared and paralyzed.
I started walking too. Then the hills moved. It took a second to understand what I was seeing. Something was coming down the hills, fast, the way a sandstorm comes, a cloud of dust followed by what looked like the land itself collapsing inward. Then the sound hit us, a concussion in the chest more than an actual noise, and the understanding arrived behind it: this was not a firework, it was danger.
People ran in all directions. The tunnel behind me was the only logical destination, and a lot of people were running for it. I had an advantage. I hadn’t walked as far toward the explosion as the others, so I was already closer to the tunnel, already in front of most of the crowd without meaning to be. I started to run.
I don’t know exactly when it happened, somewhere between the first sprint and the moment I turned back to look. But I stopped. I looked at the white wave rolling across the landscape toward us, the visible edge of the blast, eating everything between it and me, and I understood with complete clarity that running was theater. The tunnel would not save me. I would probably never reach it. Nothing would save me. The math was simple and final.
Now, the purple blast was still climbing in the sky, enormous, beautiful, terrifying. The white wave was close. People were still running past me, brushing my arms, and I just stood there watching, and I thought, weirdly, of Hiroshima. Not with horror but with a strange pragmatic thought. The bodies were vaporized. It must have been instant. Painless. That thought settled something in me, and the fear left, not gradually but all at once, like a breath released.
My mood changed entirely. Time slowed. I could see it happening, people moving in something that was not quite slow motion but close, the edges of everything gone soft. I felt warm. Genuinely warm, the kind that starts in the belly and radiates out. Happy. Grateful. Peaceful. The white wave reached the people who’d been running ahead of me, and I closed my eyes. White. Silence. Nothing.
I woke in the tunnel. The same tunnel I’d come through at the start of the dream. It must have been the one behind me when I was running, the one I never made it back to. But I was there. All of the people I previously saw were there too. We were all back at the beginning. Except this time no one was afraid or suffering. Some of them were not even human anymore. It was like an episode of Bojack Horseman where you see dogs, cats, or birds as people and it is fine, just another day in society. Also, weirdly, no one was unsatisfied. The homeless people who had been angry at the start were cheerful now. One of them would come and talk to me this time. Some people were singing. Everyone was happy just being. It felt like time had gone backwards somehow, and there would be no way to get it wrong this time.
And then I woke up.