The details get a little fuzzy. Dreams are like that: you try to grasp one thing, you get the shifting reality, the funhouse mirror effects. I'd just looked down into the gutter and the sound hit me. Something had drawn my eyes down there. A kitten? Perhaps a kitten. There's nothing I hate more than seeing kittens on these streets, cabs all crazy, bicycles flying by, no-one paying any attention to the ground. No one looks down here unless confronted with another set of eyes.

So in this dream, there's me looking down, Ave Maria in my head, my thoughts on the morning coffee that would be waiting for me. I was running late, sure, I was often late. My job, see, they're OK with me being late. In this dream, I was a file clerk for files that could wait to be filed. Does that make sense? It was a government gig, this dream job. Usually the files would be needed by someone again before I could re-file them, and there was this whole long process involved with accessing file storage and getting things in and out of the Cage, so I'd sit on files for a week or so. The Cage creeped me out. That's what we called our vault, because it was actually a cage (with a chain link roof!) inside of a larger metal shell inside of a fortified room.

So in my dream, there I was thinking: Maria? Thinking, coffee. Marcie, she buys me a coffee every morning because she knows I'm good for it, I always pay her back, and it's on her way anyhow. I'm thinking: kitten (maybe it was) and seeing in my mind's eye or maybe in the dream this kitten's hard scrabble life on the street level. Then the sound hit me.

It was like. . . I can't tell you what it was like. You know dreams, they have these gigantic things happen that defy reality. This sound, the only thing I can compare it to is imaginary, OK?Imagine a dump truck filled with scrap metal and glass and stuff, imagine that gets dropped on another dump truck from a distance of a hundred feet. That's what entered my mind, nudging the kitten aside, was hey, someone had a pretty bad accident. Trucks colliding, I could already tell it was bad and maybe it would get news. I'd be able to say, yeah, I heard that truck fall off of that bridge and hit another truck. But no bridges nearby, and there'd been this real loud noise leading up to it. Indistinct what with Maria. My headphones, see, were in the middle of Ave Maria's end and the start of something by Soundgarden I think.

There'd been this real loud noise that I and the thoughts of my kitten had completely disregarded as a combination of routine and ridiculous. A familiar noise but far too loud and wailing for attention to be really real. It was like hearing a doorbell but with The Who amplifying it, that sort of effect: I know that sound, but wow was that loud, so loud it was silly.

Then the sound of the dump trucks colliding.

Then I'm sort of looking up because the people around me...I never notice people except in dreams. In dreams I zoom right in on them. People around you in a city, they flow like water in a river. My brother back on the farm told me "sissy," he said (every country sister is nicknamed sissy, just like every brother is called bubba), "don't look people in the eye in the city. "And he'd never tell me why, but I figured it out. It's because it is exhausting. It is exhausting to see that much, enter that many lives. Be a part of that much, they take a little of you, too. So I never saw people, except in dreams.

In this dream, I noticed all these people suddenly looking up and sort of talking to themselves or to each other and pointing, the yelling or cursing or silent gaping panic. And I noticed something else: trash. Paper. So I looked up.

And here's the strangest part of the dream, where it took a real nasty nightmare turn. Why all the detail is lost. I looked up and saw an airplane sticking out of a building, then disappearing inside it. Just, wham flash gone.

Now that sound again, but this time I knew it was this airplane sound, and I realized that whooshing noise before the other dump truck crash had been a jet plane engine noise but loud and stupid close. I looked up shielding my eyes from the morning sunlight, what there was of it through the buildings, and there was paper falling, and, well, it was my dream, so it makes no sense except in my dream, there were people silhouetted against the sky. Placed there out of nowhere.

I knew they were people. I couldn't see details or anything like that, but I could just tell. In my dream, the way they fell was different than something without life. They looked impossible against the sky. Paper and furniture and debris all looked, OK, it's supposed to fall down. But people aren't, so they look all wrong, gangly or suddenly streamlined, like a bird gutshot, suddenly caught by the blast, wings skewed by the wind. I saw one, I followed it. . . him. . . her. . . whatever, all the way down with my eyes. I thought: that must be scary.

To be falling so fast and fragile. And it must be so strange! I remember thinking that on some level it must be a relief maybe to know when you're going to die. Like, it's happening right now, so no worries. Nothing else matters anymore, you're just. . . . Dream logic, you know?Doesn't have to make sense.

Anyhow, people are running both toward the buildings and away from them, and I work right there in the building, and my coffee and Marcie are both better off if I am around because I am good at decisions and fast thinking, plus I know CPR. See how dreams work? Like suddenly I'm Wonder Woman.

This dream goes all dreamy then, blurry and sort of gray as the sky fills with ash and smoke and cops and firemen try to keep people away. I see ghosts walking trailing the ash of the dead. I see parts of people, I walk right over them because it's just a dream. If it were real, I'd be in a ball on the ground, trust me.

And I get to the site and I start to try to go in to get Marcie but a group of people keep me away, take me to a building where I help whoever I can. In the dream, I do this for hours and hours as the sky gets angry and black and the buildings crumble and the ground never feels the same afterward.

And the sky looks all wrong. Stumps of amputated steel marking my friends and neighbors. The dream is short on detail but long on feeling, I cried and cried and was exhausted with all the eyes I meet, all the fear and confusion. Not knowing is the big pain. Who did this? And I used all my tricks to wake up, I bit the inside of my cheeks and I pinched my arms and slapped myself.

Afireman with tears and ash and fear and great heaving sobs throws his arms around me at the aid station. In my dream it has only been minutes since the plane hit, but the buildings are down and it is evening and I am tired, my right arm is bandaged because I cut it on something. The fireman smells of paper smoke and campfires and Icy Hot. I hug him with my whole body, press into him, cry into his chest and his tears run down into my hair and from my head down the sides of my face leaving trails in the ash covering my skin. We stand like this, the sound of him breathing in great gasps and sobs until his breathing matches mine, until we both calm down and look up and see sky again, and we all wake up.