I never called them nightmares. Not even when I was little. I always called them bad dreams.

I was sitting by myself in a cafe, next to the floor length window that faced the streets. And then I hear screaming, and glass shatters. I fall down right under the window ledge which is about a foot high, just covering my body. A man walks up, white, bearded, with an AK gun. For a second there's the silence where he stares coldly through the window, and then he starts spraying. I'm on my back propped up the slightest bit on some broken piece of furniture. He hasn't seen me yet. There is no where to move, the spray is right above me. More glass shatters on top of me as he shoots through more of the window. I don't know how realistic this is but I feel the force of bullets flying past me. I feel bodies hitting the floor and unintelligible sounds as they call out. I'm afraid to look. I try to look dead, I want to close my eyes but I can still see him just standing there; once a step forward and once to the left. I keep waiting for the terrible pain of bullets ripping through some part of me. I want to cover myself, I want to run or scream at him.

So often I think about these things happening. I think before I leave for events. I think when I'm sitting in class, or in a church service, or a movie. I map out my exits, gauge their entrance points. I try to imagine situations where we're all heroins, a few of us die to make sure the rest can have a fighting chance to live. I imagined rushing through whatever bullets to try to slow down the attacker, to make him drop his gun. But lying on the floor, with the spray of bullets coming inches above you. You know the second you sit up that you're dead. Not a martyr's death, just someone who ran into the line of fire. It would do no good, and no help. I woke up before the end.

I don't know which would have been worse for me. To sit up, into the line of fire, or to sit up in the silence and turn around to see the people I had just been having coffee with, all dead, and yet I survived.

I wake up in a world where people are dying. I'm late for work, they are dead, and I survive.
And I have to make coffee for 200 people in the next 4 hours.