RE: I had a dream the world was ending...
If you dream like that during REM sleep, you need to wake up and write these dreams down FAST. Check that box: you wrote this dream down and posted it here. Next: turn it into fiction! Perhaps I should host another contest and you could tweak this post into something that looks more like a short story that ends with a bang. Or a surprise twist. Or the actual end of the world. Or.... no, no, you can't end it with the protagonist waking up and realizing it was all just a dream! Dorothy did that in Wizard of Oz, and now it's a cliche. Like starting with "It was a dark and stormy night," and he realized the world was about to end and only he could save the world, but then it blew up, but he woke up and realized it was just a dream" Ok. Do you write fiction... or just programming stuff?
Yeah, I write fiction. I have an unfinished sci-fi novel on here short one half of a chapter.
I'm pretty sure it's a recurring dream. I'm fairly certain I half remember it happening before. But it doesn't always happen as it did before.
I've never gotten into the habit of keeping a pen and paper by the bed as some say. It doesn't really fit with me. Perhaps in this digital age a laptop.
The problem with writing fiction from it is that it's never the same as the original. It's something that I lived...even if in a dream. And there's so much missing. I remember running through some sort of market as some sort of terrorists moved with some sort of machine guns and deployed dirty bombs in various places...but there's so much I don't remember....
We need little camcorders in our heads to videotape our dreams! No matter how swiftly or soon we write it down, it's true -- the fiction we write never captures the gestalt of the original--as English majors learn from the epic 1897 Coleridge poem "Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment" - According to Coleridge the poem was composed one night after he experienced an opium-influenced dream after reading a work describing Xanadu, the summer palace of the Mongol ruler and Emperor of China Kublai Khan. Upon waking, he set about writing lines of poetry that came to him from the dream until he was interrupted by "a person from Porlock". The poem could not be completed according to its original 200–300 line plan as the interruption caused him to forget the lines. He left it unpublished and kept it for private readings for his friends until 1816 when, at the prompting of Lord Byron, it was published. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubla_Khan
On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone had been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter:
Then all the charm
Is broken—all that phantom-world so fair
Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,
And each mis-shape the other. Stay awhile,
Poor youth! who scarcely dar'st lift up thine eyes—
The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon
The visions will return! And lo! he stays,
And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms
Come trembling back, unite, and now once more
The pool becomes a mirror.
Yet from the still surviving recollections in his mind, the Author has frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to him. but the to-morrow is yet to come.
Kubla Khan
"Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment" is a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, completed in 1797 and published in 1816. According to Coleridge's preface to "Kubla Khan", the poem was composed one night after he experienced an opium-influenced dream after reading a work describing Xanadu, the summer palace of the Mongol ruler and Emperor of China Kublai Khan. Upon waking, he set about writing lines of poetry that came to him from the dream until he was interrupted by "a person from Porlock". The poem could not be completed according to its original 200–300 line plan as the interruption caused him to forget the lines.