The worst nightmare you've ever had

What's the worst nightmare you ever had?

I had a particularly bad one a few days ago that left me freaked out all that day.

Apparently it had been brought on because I had watched an old movie called "Where Have all the People Gone" from 1974, a grim and fairly effective end-of-the-world sci-fi about a solar flare wiping out almost all of humanity with radiation poisoning within a couple of days.

My fertile imagination apparently decided to build on that concept, because my dream was that the human race found out that we had less than a year to live because the sun was getting hotter (Supernova? It didn't get more specific than that) and was going to make the existence of any form of life in the solar system impossible.

It was the vividness and finality of the dream which was truly horrific, the idea that the earth and solar system were going to be wiped clean of any proof that life ever existed. No ruins, no oceans, buried fossils, or even bacteria deep within the ground, nothing, it was all going to be reduced to superheated gases and molten rock.

It was enough to have me looking at the trees on the sides of the highway on my way to work and taking comfort in the fact that there was no reason to think that they wouldn't still be there long after I'm gone.

Just thought I'd brighten everyone's day!

And no, I'm not reading more into this other than it simply being a bad remarkably bad dream.

One of the last things I remember happening in the dream was looking at the headline of a newspaper which told of how talks between nations on forming some kind of plan had fallen apart, simply because it didn't matter, there was nothing in known science that could help us even begin to deal with the situation. The only other headline next to it was how there were reports of massive increases in suicides all over the world.

On an inside page I saw what was almost like a political cartoon, on the upper half it showed primordial man running with a club, and on the lower it showed the people of the present wandering around awaiting the end in hopelessness and disbelief. I guess the symbolism of that is how mankind began and how it ended.

This is when I finally grasped the magnitude of what was happening and it completely freaked me out, and my final thoughts were how I should rush to the nearest pharmacy and buy sleeping pills because stocks were certain to immediately dry up. I wondered whether even under the circumstances suicide would still be a major sin, and if when the time came I would have to nerve to decide.

Yikes, fortunately I'm having a better day today, I think I'll watch a comedy tonight.