Thunderscream

Several summers ago, when I was living in Lake Ridge, I was in the middle of a dream (the bulk of which I can't remember) in the morning. Outside, it was raining heavily. In the dream, someone right in front of me, practically in my face, was getting ready to scream.

And just then, as I woke up, a huge roar of thunder came from very close by.

I have a hard time believing that the coordination of the dream scenario and the real world lightning strike was a coincidence — people screaming in my dreams is, in itself, a pretty rare thing, and to be perfectly timed to a very close lightning strike (also somewhat rare, though not as rare during the summer) is... Well, I think I can come up with a couple possible reasons for it.

One possibility is that the lightning struck brightly, and I registered it unconsciously through my eyelids while still asleep, and somewhere deep down, I knew there should be a really loud noise following shortly thereafter, for which my dream world constructed the image of someone getting ready to scream.

Another possibility is that I woke up to lightning and thunder, and only after waking up did I imagine that I had dreamed of somebody about to scream, but for whatever reason, the chronological order of the memory was quickly scrambled.

I guess the third obvious possibility is that there was no real correspondence between the dream and the events going on outside my window, but the salience of the experience caused me to assign more meaning to it than was really there. A good point of evidence why this could be the case: I can't recall ever having had another experience quite like this.