I can’t imagine throwing out the type of prediction that heralded the end of the world. Especially attaching a calendar date, such as this May 21^st hoopla – which, as I’m certain you have already guessed – will not be the day the world ends. Or the day Jesus comes back. Besides, I’m fairly certain Jesus is in Cancun right now, officiating over the Coconut Festival. (They wanted Bono, but he was busy feeding African kids.)

Announcing the end of the world, along with citing Jesus on the guest list, would require a hubris that shoots far beyond my ability to comprehend, let alone muster. As such, my dreams are far less grandiose – no descending Savior dividing the righteous from the unrighteous as the blackened skies of The Rapture erupt with purple lightning and Arc Angels. No, instead, I get to dream about pending disasters of the Secular kind.

This time, centered in my dream was a city worthy of good Rapture Wrecking – one of my favorite 4-hours-from-Los-Angeles road trips, Sin City herself – Las Vegas.

I actually had this dream while on an incredibly rigorous 12-date music tour in the Pacific Northwest at the end of a January 2011. I had been sleeping well every night, but one morning, I woke up from this disturbing dream that I had a hard time “shaking”.

The dream was as follows:

There was no ramp-up to the dream that I can remember. It was if I was beamed directly into the dream, mid-action. That itself was very strange. The dream begins with me in mid-hurl as I’m being thrown forward on a sidewalk. I catch myself with my right hand, scraping it on the cement. I’m being tossed by the ground shaking violently back and forth, small light bulbs bursting above me, shower of fine glass raining down on the sidewalk, bulbs plummeting and exploding, so many bulbs raining down —

What in the…? I’m looked around – it’s mid-day — where am I?  What is going on? How did I even get here?

I can’t keep my footing as the ground is heaving so dramatically. Between my lack of footing and the sound of one thousand angry trains rumbling beneath the sidewalk, I’m tipped off that indeed, this is an earthquake. A monster, the likes I’ve never experienced. The geothermal pressure is uncomfortable in my inner ear, down my throat.

But where am I? The buildings aren’t that tall – three, maybe four stories, if that?

A giant antique tin overhang is twisting and tearing apart, the metal screaming above me. I don’t have time to look up, amidst the shower of glass, and suddenly an enormous metal facing, looks like from the 1950’s, comes crashing down mere feet in front of me, the thin tin twisted up like tinfoil and the colorful wire guts shaking out of their 60-year-old home.

I scramble toward the middle of the street to get out from beneath whatever overhang I’m clearly standing beneath. I turn to look up, over my shoulder, just in time to see enormous dark-blue letters from an equally enormous marquee crashing to the sidewalk below, where I had been. The bulky marquee panels then pop out, curling like angry sails to the ground, the old, brittle plastic cracking into shards that are bounced dozens of yards away.

It dawns on me: A marquee, huge letter signage, thousands of light bubs, glass – oh my God. I’m in Las Vegas. I have to be.

Not the new strip, but the old section, downtown, home of the original two and three story casinos whose 1950’s glitter was created by thousands of independently burning lights, tacked over cheap sign tin then slapped up quickly to establish the string of watering holes that put Vegas on the map. Old Vegas is maintained to this day. Or it was – until this.

I scramble my way to the center of an intersection, to get out from beneath the rain of glass. I can’t get my footing, the ground is bounding and grinding so erratically. I recall thinking that the shaking was extremely severe, even for an earthquake. I’m tossed on to my knees over and over again. On the opposite corner of the street, a building about four stories high finally begins to give up its light-blue reflective windows. The glass panels are no match for the pressure of the building shifting and twisting – they pop and shatter outward like a child playing with bubble wrap. These windows and their building, which I’m pretty sure is a bank, are taking a beating, but aren’t nearly reduced to the twisted and gutted wreck like the old casinos behind me. Yet even the mortar on this new tan-bricked bank, whose more modern construction is wearing better against the earthquake, has sprouted cracks racing up the structure, like varicose veins exploding up the ankle of a geriatric P.E. coach.

I am able to crawl-stumble to the center of the intersection, dodging traffic light poles above me that are violently swaying like an oak tree in a tornado. The traffic lights, looking like macabre wedding bells, swing back and forth rapidly. I then get a good look up the street.

The street on the horizon is rising. Cars which had been parked at the curb are sliding down the street toward me, the road lifting as if on hydraulics. The cars tumble and roll and pile up on one another, and then a separate car comes flying out into the intersection from the street to my right, and smashes into the blue-windowed building. Obviously, the street to my right is rising as well – then the road that I have been watching steadily raise in front of me cracks in half, a deep crevice opening up as both sides continue to push upward. The crevice is snaking down the asphalt, toward the center of the intersection, directly toward me – I’m out of room to run, out of safe places to escape. I frantically dive to the right to avoid being swallowed into this black cavernous drop that’s gaping open in the road —

— I’m standing in the middle of a gravel lot. I look around – I’m not in Vegas anymore. It’s night. I’m standing in the middle of what looked like it had been, at one time, an old fort, now in an old historic part of town. High walls slathered in creosote and some kind of dark stain are made of logs and timber, over 20 feet tall. I’m boxed in, but it’s comforting – no glass. I feel like I’m in Texas, or Arizona, or New Mexico – somewhere that had an old fort present in the settling of the country.

In front of me stands a man, mid to late twenties, about 6 foot 2, doughy, wire-rimmed glasses, sort of wavy and unkempt hair, wearing a paint-stained brown baggy T-shirt and work pants. He works on some sort of construction crew here, wherever “here” is. I’m realizing that the dirt lot was the location of a structure that this crew had torn down. This man was on the night crew. He holds a ball peen hammer.  They’re finishing taking out the rest of whatever must be torn out.

I’m suddenly realizing that something is wrong. Well, not that it’s wrong right this second, but it’s going to be VERY wrong in a few moments. This guy is not very bright. And I’m realizing I need to get the hammer out of his hand, or he’s going to be overcome by something very dark, very evil – and use it on me, and another gal that is standing next to me.

“Can I have your hammer?” I ask him.

He’s looking at me really strangely. “Well, I need it for work.”

“I understand,” I said, “but can you give it to me, for just a minute?”

He’s getting a touch irritated with me. “No, I need it to keep working,” he says.

I finally reach in and wrap my fingers around the hammer, because I’m realizing that this dark and evil thing has already started to try and overtake this guy – a possession of sorts. I’m pretty insistent at this point, as I realize he’s going to try and sink that ball peen hammer straight into my brain pan, once this evil spirit gets completely seated in him. “I promise you, I’ll give it right back. I just need to hold it for a minute – please.”

He gives me this glazed look, or rather – this thing that’s trying to crawl inside of him gives me this glazed look, but he lets me peel the hammer out of his hand. The look starts to change in his eye – but I now have the hammer.  I throw hard, lobbing the hammer over the wall of the fort. He’s glazed out, and just stands there, and stares at me with contempt. The “thing” has overtaken him.

It then dawns on me that these evil entities are going to be lighting all over people across this whole city, taking them over. I look over at the gateway to this old fort – two doors both around 20 feet high – and I see my mom, along with a group of others, disappearing out the door, and into the parking lot. I yell to stop her from leaving out into the lot, but she disappears before I can stop her.

I immediately run to the door, but in the split second it takes me to get there – she is gone into thin air, along with the mall crowd of people. I run out to the lot, calling for her. The parking area outside the fort walls is a typical gravel lot, full of cars. There are only two street lamps in the lot, feebly cutting orange through the dusty night. I begin shouting for my mom, frantic to find her before one of these possessed people get a hold of her. No one knew about these evil entities but me – I hadn’t had a chance to tell anyone yet. I just figured out that this infestation was befalling this place. I could feel an epidemic sprouting all over the city.

I realize my mom’s car is in the back of the lot, which is an area without lights, but is chain-linked in – I can see where the light from the streetlamp behind me fades out, into the blackness of this back lot. I’m calling, trying to keep my voice down. As I cross into this dim chain link area, I can faintly see people start to emerge from between the cars, slowly.  They are staring at me, silently. These people have all been overtaken by this evil epidemic. Normal looking people, but taken over as if wide-awake, sharp-minded, normal looking Zombies.

I stop at the edge of where the street light dims into blackness. I keep quietly calling for my mom. I can hear someone running toward me in the gravel, from far back in the lot, but I can’t see them in the pitch black. They are right out of the light’s view. The steps get faster and crunchier in the gravel, crunch crunch, crunch-crunch chrunchrunchruch, and three steps away I can finally see a man, dimly lit, running straight at me with some kind of tire iron, or pick, raised in his hand. He runs straight into me —

— I wake up. Or, well, “wake up”. In fact, I had a hard time waking.  As hokey as this may sound, I was awake, my eyes were open, I was observing my room around me, yet I was transitioning out from one place to another. It looked as if the walls of the room that I was staying in appeared to be covered in “cells” – it was a touch disturbing, the whole “dimensional shift” aspect of waking from this “dream” and into an “in between place” while I waited for my consciousness to firmly seat back into my body – hovering in a place that looked like it should have been a set for “Jacob’s Ladder”, superimposed over the walls of my room. I was clearly awake, but not quite “all back yet”. That doesn’t happen very often.

Needless to say, coming back from wherever I had been in my spiritual consciousness in order to gather this dream was a tad rough. I was none too excited about the strange, creepy, Purgatory-Adjacent leftovers all around the room that were slowly fading out, like the two sets of what looked like black and grey clawed hands, frozen while reaching up through the top of the dresser. As if that makes any sense. Clearly, in whatever dimension these things existed – there wasn’t a dresser there. I was awake, laying in bed, but staring at two places at once: The room I was staying in, and this “place”, both occupying the same place at the same time – because I was occupying more than one place at one time.

Again – that rarely happens. It hasn’t happened to me in years, and as you can imagine  – I’m rather glad about that. But it happened this time, and it definitely got my full attention. Besides me just wondering what the heck had been in my bath water the night before, it was likely that in the grand scheme of things, I was allowed to experience this bizarre H.P. Lovecraft scenario in order to draw my attention to the dream. It’s the Universe’s way of saying “remember this – it bears weight.” Yet enough, enough of the waking-out-of-the-dream-into-the-set-of-The-Ring segue.

I’d like to take a moment to mention that I had been staying in this room for 14 days at this point. It was a gorgeous room with lovely bedding, khaki green walls, cream colored carpeting, a bottle of Patron and bottles of sparkling water, supplied to me by the record label I’m signed to. And, though the room started out quiet, it began to increase with spiritual activity as my stay persisted, especially the last four days. And the activity wasn’t that friendly.

The location where I was staying is built on some rather eerie land, and the structure has a presence. I’d run into a formerly human spirit in the upstairs hallway, but it was benign. However, this room was a little different. It had a lurker or two that wasn’t my friend upstairs. I could physically see a dark shadow moving through the room when the lights were on, and my jury was out on whether or not it was a dark human spirit, or some kind of not-so-happy earth spirit that came with the creepy land this place is built upon – but it gave me the willies, and as such, I would ask it to not bother me, say extra prayers to charge the space up — and ignored it for the most part. When in doubt – ignore. Especially when you’re fairly sure that the spirit is inhuman.

The room I was staying in didn’t have any windows. That kind of environment with stagnant energy flow is a magnet for dark spirits, earth spirits, and non-human entities. From an aesthetic perspective, it is a beautiful converted space, and has a fader to the very nice modern halogen chandelier hanging from the high roof. At night, I would fade the lights almost completely out – they would be nearly off, but down to a tiny, low glow, just so there would be some light in this room. Otherwise, to turn the lights out left one in a pitch black space, where I couldn’t even see my hand in front of my face. Again, no windows.

The night before I had this unnerving dream was the second to the last night I was to be there, at the end of the tour. The things in the room had a much greater opportunity to observe me, and my patterns, and figure out where my buttons were, to push. I had placed the light very low and gone to bed, just like I did every other night for the last twelve days. I went to sleep. I later popped awake in the middle of the night, for no apparent reason…except the room was pitch black.

The lights had been turned out. And not by me, while I was sleeping.

I blinked a couple of times before I realized that I was indeed, in pitch blackness. Luckily, there was a space heater on, and I could see its little red light glowing in the darkness as it hummed with heat. I immediately knew what had occurred. The thing in the room had turned the light out. It was tired of being ignored. This was its big show of dominance. It knew I was not fond of the blackness in the room – it had overheard me talking to someone on the phone about it.

I was none too happy to be in pitch black room with a negative entity or two. But, knowing that this thing wanted me to be scared, I just got irritated. The “scare factor” was a touch obvious for my taste at that point.

“Really?” I said into the inky blackness. “Ah, come on, you guys, I have got to get sleep. Seriously.”

I climbed out of bed and shuffled through the inky blackness to the far wall where the fader was.

“I have a show tomorrow, you guys. Yes, I get it, you’re here, and you turned the lights off. But come on, you woke me up. This is not cool, you guys.”

I was keeping my cool, because in this situation, if you loose your cool, it’s like losing a stare-off with a wolf – be prepared for the pounce. I’m feeling for the light switch in the dark, and feeling this thing standing just two inches off of my left, and thinking to myself, man, if you could breathe, thing, I’d feel your breath on my check.

It was one of those combination switches, where it had an on-off switch, or the fader could be potted up or down. At night, I would pot the fader almost all the way down. I first felt to see if the switch had been turned off. It had not. It was still on.

This thing had actually faded the light ALL the way down, so had I hit the switch either way – I would have still been in pitch darkness. Smart.

“Aw, man, come on, you actually faded it down?” I said, trying to fill the room with at least my voice to cut the creepiness of this thing standing right beside me in the blackness.

I feel right next to the switch, and sure enough – the little fader was pulled all the way to the bottom. That’s obviously something that must be done manually. I pushed it up. The lights glowed in the room.

“I’m serious, you guys. I need to sleep. If you can’t leave me alone, you have to leave. Period.”

And with that, I said a prayer, closed my eyes and passed out. I never had a “problem” with the light after that. The next night, I dreamed about Vegas falling in on itself and people being possessed by demons. Nice. As a side note, the morning after that dream, I walked out into the common area of place I was staying, and the label CEO asked me if I was okay, because he said I looked awful. Truly, I felt awful. I told him about the earthquake part of the dream. He said he hoped it was just a dream.

When the Japan quake first happened, I thought the Vegas dream was a premonition for that incident, and the lights and marquees I saw, that I thought were Vegas, were actually Tokyo, and I had mis-called the scenery. But the more I have sat with this dream, the more I realized – nope. It wasn’t Japan. It’s Las Vegas. And it hasn’t happened yet.

Just recently this dream has been weighing heavily on me again. Just to satisfy my curiosity, I Googled “Las Vegas Fault Line Map”, and was a bit stunned at what I found.

Turns out that the Frenchman Mountain fault runs through the Las Vegas valley. And it’s a real rattler. It also turns out that the San Andreas fault runs through Reno. According to an article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal entitled “State geologist estimates possible earthquake risk”:

Someday Las Vegans will read a headline that states, “2,300 Die From 7.0 Magnitude Earthquake,” state Geologist Jon Price predicted.

The full article is here, and is rather fascinating, though a little unnerving.

http://www.lvrj.com/news/state-geologist-estimates-possible-earthquake-risk-69268747.html 

So. Was my dream just the bi-product of staying in a haunted room? Maybe the second part was, with the demon-possessed people – although I think that was a touch allegorically predictive as well. AND – remember the guy in the dream who I took the ball peen hammer from? Well he was a dead-ringer for the actual person the “Missing Peace” team interviewed, two months later, regarding the murder of Norma Lopez. So that was an odd synchronicity there.

So no. The world will not be ending on May 21^st. If it did, and you’re reading this, then I guess you were on the “denied rapture” list. Sorry, dude. If you were planning on hitting Vegas to drown your sorrows over not being picked for the prom, you may want to step it up a bit. That, or wait – I bet you’ll be able to get one heck of a room at the Bellagio for practically nothing, after the quake.

What can I say — I’m a “glass-half-full” kind of gal.