unreal yet so real

I’m at a party of university students and young adults. It is a large apartment or small house, nondescript, white-beige walls. I’m in the living room stretched out on a long eggshell sofa with thick padded arms that runs most of the length of a wall dividing the living and dining rooms.

The passage between them is wide, affording easy views from one into the next from certain vantage points. The party is low-key, subdued with coversation. I’m chit-chatting with a casual acquaintance, male, tall and somewhat lanky.

Commotion erupts in the next room. I ask the acquaintance who is standing what’s going on. He can’t tell but it may be danger. He flees out the front door.

The eruption is revealed to be a man who's pulled out a gun. He’s circulating the two rooms choosing whom to shoot. (It is not with the wild abandon of the Virgina Tech shooter.) The rhyme and reason of his choices are known only to him. Fleeing is no longer an option. I sink deep into the couch, left side of my face pressed against a back cushion, and feign sleep. A partial covering of hair leaves half my face exposed so sleep must appear genuine. Eyes still, no fluttering. Relaxed. Quiet. Unmoving. Deep breathing. I hear him enter, pass by, feel his presence as he circulates in the room. I want to peek through narrowed eyes to know where he is, what he's doing, yet there's risk if he finds out I'm awake. So I lift my eyelids ever so slightly and peer, quickly. He’s not in my vision range.

I close my eyes again. "I'm sleeping, I'm sleeping." A dozing person won't interest him, he'll leave me be, it's hoped. Deep resting breathing. He approaches the couch, stops, looks at me, considers. I do not know his criteria for my fate that he holds. Then I feel the cold black metal of a gun barrel with a hole slightly smaller than a quarter pressed into the flesh of my neck near the right carotid artery. He holds it there. He in his own thoughts is deciding. I am waiting.

And I wake up. Of dreams it's said that one cannot and does not dream of actually dying, so I don't know the outcome. Waking up was good, necessary.  It was unreal yet real. Apart from the vivid details, something about it strikes so familiar. As if I'd been there. Or perhaps years ago read a newspaper story, long since forgotten, about a similar event. I dunno. I think the stress of my current situation is really getting to me.