48. 911_throwaway

On the night of September 10th, 2001 I had a couple of very vivid dreams. The kind where you are half awake and almost daydreaming.
In the first one I don’t remember how it started, but I saw an airplane crash into a huge metal structure with a lot of windows. To be honest I thought it was a train, but I was confused because it wasn’t lying flat on the ground like a train. I then heard screams and they were so real to me that they woke me up. I was sweating and panicked. It took me about an hour to calm down and fall asleep.
Then, I had the exact same dream again and it woke me up again at the exact same moment and those screams sounded just as real. This time it took me almost 2 hours to fall asleep as I was deeply disturbed that I would have the exact same dream so vividly twice in one night.

When I finally fell asleep again I had one last dream. There were a bunch of people in the air and they were flying. Not in a plane, but just flying with their arms out like superman, zooming all over the place. Everyone was smiling and having fun. Then, all at once they stopped and started to fall. They all started screaming and I could see their terrified faces as they fell. Once again I woke up from the screams. I didn’t sleep well the rest of the night.

The next morning I slept in (I was in college and only had late classes that day). At about 9:30 I was woken up by my girlfriend calling me to tell me about the plane crashing into the world trade center. I honestly had never seen the WTC before, so I didn’t know what I was about to see when I turned on the TV. All the pieces from my dreams the night before seemed to come together in this one event. It was horrible.
I am being completely honest here and have not embellished one bit. I really wish this wasn’t true. It troubled me so deeply that I couldn’t finish the semester at school and failed and dropped out of most of my classes even though it was my senior year and I was getting ready to graduate. I have tried to get over this for years, but I still have horrible guilt and nightmares about it.