I saw the missiles launch.

The dream was too real.

I had a nightmare that we elected a President that started a nuclear war. I don't even know if it was Hillary or Trump that caused it. I just saw it happen. Read on for my experience:

In my dream, I slept in late while visiting my mom. She had already taken my little sister to daycare and left for work, I assumed. I walked into the kitchen to hunt breakfast, and noticed through the sliding glass door that the sky was a really strange color. Dark blue, like lapis lazuli. At first I thought maybe someone had stretched a tarp over the patio, but when I went out onto the deck, I could clearly see that the sky was changing colors that I had never seen in it before. It looked photoshopped. As I watched, the dark blue began to glow dark purple at the horizon. Then there was this violent violet that started appearing in ripples. The ripples fanned out across the sky with white growing within them as they stretched, and within the white were bright teal patterns. Like lightning. The teal lightning grew and continued taking over the sky, until the entire horizon looked like a teal and white storm approaching.

I thought to myself, "This must be an electrical storm." I thought, "That's the weirdest looking storm I have ever seen," and I thought, "I wish there was someone here to watch it with me. It's beautiful." As I stood there, stunned, I started seeing these large furrows raked through the patterns. Like grubs eating their way across a leaf. As they passed over my head, faster than I expected, I realized that I had seen this pattern dozens of times before in movies. Missile launch. I dropped my gaze from the sky down towards the land. I was facing west, towards the coastal mountain range. "China?" I questioned myself. Briefly, I blamed the idiot President, but then my attention was caught again by the heavens. Tiny pink lines now that cut through the other colors. Streaming up and then separating to chase after the missiles. I vaguely identified them as fighter jets. I had seen them in movies, too. Somehow, they seemed more dangerous to me than the missile launch, but I didn't run. I wanted to watch the sky and its weird, vibrant colors for a while longer. This was an important event. I wanted to be able to describe it for history. It was then that I thought that I should go check the news, or get on Imgur and see what people were saying. How had this shit started?

Then I saw the bombs. They looked like cartoons the way their shapes slowly fell through the sky. Math class had somehow prepared me with enough understanding of trajectory to realize the one above my house would actually land a bit distant from my block. Selfishly, I didn't even spare a thought, at the time, for the wellbeing of my neighbors. I stepped inside and locked the door behind me. I felt cold fear. The kind where you know there is great trauma or tragedy coming, but you run around trying to be practical, trying to do what you think is necessary. I ran to the front door and locked that, too. I wasn't thinking clearly, or I would have realized that soon the windows would shatter and locked doors would mean very little. However, I had the prescience to realize that the laundry machine would probably flood the house, if it all survived, so I needed to turn off the water. For about two minutes I ran around doing fairly useless tasks of 'preparation' for the crisis. I could feel vibrations from the floor, the walls, from everywhere, from the distant impacts. We're used to earthquakes along the Pacific. I went into the basement to find a doorframe to sit in.

I sat there texting my mom. "BOMBS! Find Lily. Get underground!" I didn't want to talk to her. I knew there was no way she could get to the daycare in time. I also knew that there was nothing near where she worked that had a basement. For some reason, with all this going on, I did not get online. I should have checked. I looked around my room. Packed up boxes of my old art, business files, clothes. I wondered if there was anything I felt was worth saving. Mom had always called me a packrat, because I'm too sentimental, and I don't like throwing out things I can make use of. Now, I couldn't see anything around me that would be practical to tote around in the apocalyptic suburbs I was sure to face after all this. If I survived.

Then I woke up. I stared into the closed eyes of my partner, with my heart racing in that same prolonged cold fear. Maybe I started shaking, or maybe he felt someone staring at him long and hard. His eyes opened, sleepy. He blinked and widened them in an attempt to wake up. "Huh?" he asked me. I tried to reply, "I," but, in some cliche, my voice didn't respond. "What is it?" he asked. I stared into his eyes for a few more seconds, but I was seeing the missile launch again. "I saw the bombs," I managed to gasp out. His eyes narrowed at me, and he muttered, "I didn't do it," before he turned over and went back to sleep. Meanwhile, I grabbed my laptop to type up what I had just experienced. I wonder why I didn't call him in my dream. But it was just a dream.

Just a dream, right?

These are the colors I saw, if you are interested.