epiphany

Earthquake?

I think we had an earthquake here last night.

Now, I've never consciously experienced an earthquake, so I don't really know what they're like (I was told that I drove through one in Alaska, but we didn't notice it in the car). However, I awoke at 1:14am to a shaking bed. I could hear various things around the house rattling, and the pit of my stomach was vibrating like someone was playing snare rhythms on a bass drum. It lasted around eight seconds but kept me awake much longer. Although I've heard that it's a theoretical possibility, the upper Midwest simply doesn't get earthquakes.

So I'm trying to figure out what the possibilities are. It wasn't a truck, unless the truck was magnificently overloaded, because semis have been going by most of the night, and none of them shook the house. It could have been a train speeding through town. Trains often make the house tremble, but this would have been one very short train moving at an illegal rate of speed to shake my bed that badly. Maybe it was a sonic boom? I don't recall hearing the "boom" part, and I doubt that a sonic boom would last quite as long as this did. My two best conclusions are that it was either an earthquake or a dream.

When I was in China, I would sometimes wake up in the night with the "knowledge" that someone was in my apartment or room, and I'd have to shine my flashlight around the place to prove that no one had come in. That dream and sensory variations on it were fairly common for me. Perhaps this was simply an adjustment of that dream? Also adding to the likelihood of it being a dream is that nothing seems to have fallen down or even moved. I would think that something strong enough to shake my bed for close to ten seconds would have also made at least a few knick knacks (of which the house has plenty) fall down or at least look disorderly.

Still, I don't think I would have dreamed the stomach part. It wasn't until I got up this morning that I realized that the stomach feeling would match the effects of a very low tone, one just under the edge of audibility. Sometimes my dreams come up with crazy things, but that mixed with the other feelings and the sounds seem a little too complex for my head, especially without a previous experience to base them on.

I haven't read the online news yet, but if it was an earthquake, I wouldn't expect to see it written up until later in the day. After all, last week our capital and a small town got hit with tornados on Wednesday evening, and I didn't see it on CNN until the following afternoon (I never found it on Fox). Then again, seeing the level of coverage our area gets on the national news, maybe it would never be reported!

Posted by at June 28, 2004 7:24 AM