HomeEarthquake (a fuller account)
In which I record what an earthquake felt like
This gets written down today, and not left any longer, so I don’t forget it.
I was jolted out of a dream about school. Why are so many dreams about school? I was jolted out, and it felt like a sharp jolt, into a shaking bed.
It was all over very quickly. Reading this post will take you much longer than the time it took in reality, so try to imagine this compressed tightly. I had time to think: something big is crashing, a truck, a plane. An army is marching down the street outside, their tanks rumbling and shaking everything. The room was shaking, and the shaking was building up, and a very deep and loud rumbling sound was getting stronger too. Something in the plumbing went splang! I was picturing a burning something outside, still, but the shaking faded away, gently and slowly. Still waking up, I realised everything was still, and the thought popped into my head: we’ve just had an earthquake. A strong earthquake. It didn’t occur to me just how unusual that was, until the next morning.*
By the time the shaking stopped, it was about 6 or 7 seconds since I’d woken up. Groggily, I stumbled downstairs. Everything was intact, and nothing had fallen over; but the cat was racing about like a mad thing. So I did what anyone would have done: logged on to the computer and wrote a blog post about it.
* A thousand years ago it might not have been that unusual, interestingly enough. There’s a small chance that bigger earthquakes are going to be much more common from now on.