poetry and the apocalypse

Last night I had a dream about a reading, but one that turned into a dream about terrorists. It was in my neighborhood, a series I'd read at before, but the coffee shop was different, bigger, and there was much gossiping, and worrying about where to put my bag so no one could steal my keys and whether or not I had the money to buy a muffin. When the reading started the room was full and the hostess was going to read some of her fiction, but there was this awful feedback from the mike that drowned her out entirely at a slow hum. One of the sound guys (who is also someone I work with IRL) was trying to fix it, but in doing so, somehow managed to make it even louder, ear splitting to the point where the audience was beginning to get up and leave. I turned toward the windows to see that the light outside was odd, greenish and hazy. People were running past the windows and there was smoke coming from the building across the street. As we emptied out onto the sidewalk, it became obvious that there was some sort of attack going on, and that the mic feedback was not mic feedback at all, but some kind of high frequency sonar weapon. The tops of the buildings were smoking. The el tracks were on fire. As I walked east I could see that there were buildings somehow across the lake missing pieces. Someone pointed at a plane in the sky and it's bottom opened and dropped a shiny white something into the air as we all scrambled for cover inside a building with unlocked doors and tiny, bunker like windows where we watched everything flying around, slow motion, for a moment before it was safe to file back out onto the sidewalk. My alarm must have gone off then, but I couldn't shake the unease all morning. It reminded me of my bad dreams after 9/11 which lasted for months, and since I have a pedilection for plane crashes in my dreams irregardless of that, sometimes things get a little scary. At least I don't dream about tornados anymore...