The End of the World ... ?
Last night I had a dream that took place on August 2, 2007. I was having lunch with a couple of my friends (Ken and Nik) and I remembered seeing a trailer for a flick opening on August 17. "That movie is going to be perfect for Bad Movie Night," I said. We definitely need to hit that one up for our last Bad Movie Night before bowling resumes."
"Umm, Scoot?" Ken asked, "you're aware we're not going to be able to see that movie, right?"
"Why not?" I asked.
"Umm... because we're all going to be dead in less than two weeks."
I didn't know what they were talking about, so I asked them to explain. They explained that the world was under seige by aliens and that in 10 days they would arrive and take away all of the water and begin physically toruring every person on Earth. After about 3-4 days of intense torture, they were then going to kill us all by fileting us open.
"Surely that won't happen," I said, "surely our government will figure out some way to stop it."
"The government has done all they can," Nik said. "Their negotiations are the only reason the attack hasn't already started, they were able to buy us all 2 more weeks to live. But that's it."
"I'm not buying it," I said.
"Google it," they both said. "It's all over the web, it's all anyone's been talking about. Where have you been?"
I decided not to Google it, prefering to hold steadfast to my hope that they were just trying to scare me. I wanted to keep my blidssful ignorance. But as the days passed I became filled with more dread and more terror.
Eventually, though, I realized that two weeks had passed and nothing had happened yet. So I called up Ken and asked him, "We're still alive... what the hell?"
"I don't know," he said. "We were all supposed to have been dead by now, just like Tom Cruise and John Travolta predicted."
[long pause]
"Wait a minute," I said. "You had me all worked up and accepted as fact something that a couple of Scientologists predicted????"
"Well, yeah," he said, "it was pretty convincing, even the government was taking action on it."
"Don't you realize that those two put out that same end-of-the-world prediction every year so that when it eventually does happen, whether it's 5, 50, or 5 billion years from now they can still claim credit for predicting it?" I asked, incredulously.
"Ummm... uh.... they do?"
"God you guys are dumb," I said. "Guess what, you get to live."
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Though we all lived, I'm still a little creeped out that the dream was set in the future and came with an approximate date range for some sort of disaster.