Woke up in the middle of the night with a stabbing back pain, and interrupted in the middle of a dream. It was so vivid I was briefly alarmed that it was a real memory I suppressed from the trauma ... but then I realized it was not so.
Here's what happened.
Me and my college roommate buddy ... well, a little background here too. This would be a person I haven't thought of in 5+ years, a fine roommate but otherwise of little consequence outside the semester we shared living quarters. He was a bit of a party guy and our schedules rarely intersected. For the most part a very good roommate situation, except for the occasional Typical College Drunken Antics™.
To resume.
The dream was of us participating in some extreme sport. The gear consisted of hooks, cables, cords, clips, harnesses, and other assorted mountain-climbing-like oddities and accoutrements (it wasn't climbing though). He kept trying to clip onto my harness, half in jest and half to speed his progress at the cost of mine. At one point I pushed him away a little harder than I wanted to and he fell, far far far.... and broke his neck. Didn't die, but was paralyzed when I landed next to him .... at which point, somewhat dismayed, I woke up. The look in his aware eyes combined with the inability to move was a little unsettling (not that I've had any extensive dealings with neck injuries...).
In that half awake and half asleep state it occurred to me that this might have happened and maybe I suppressed it .... but then I realized what the sport was. You see, we were superjumping buildings, superhero style. I don't mean the 3-foot gap between uptown brownstones ... I mean skyscrapers. With a single bound, and all that .... feeling the air rush past you as you soar effortlessly through the air, dropping on exactly the right part of the roof you were aiming for, sometimes missing and using your ropes to grab on to something to slow your fall, then taking off again in a pure rush of energy, doing your best to get the most distance out of your parabola before the old 9.8 meters per second per second kicks in ... yeah. Good times.
As I rolled over and went back to sleep, reassured, the dream smoothly resumed and segued into counter-intelligence efforts in Nazi-occupied Poland, which was far more likely. | 
