Flying to Irvine, I was sitting in my aisle seat in between attempted deep cleansing breaths, thoughts meant to distract myself from the realization that I was in a big metal contraption 20,000 feet in the air, and pages in the book I wasn't really reading or seeing - and I happened to look out the window and therefore saw something I really, really wasn't expecting to see.

We were very close to landing (the pilot had already told the flight attendants to prepare for it) and what looked like 500 feet away from the left wing was a big peak covered with snow and pine trees.

I mean, yeah, if I had thought about it harder I would have realized that there are snowy peaks very close to Irvine and etc etc but in the moment it seemed so out of place that I was pretty sure we were going to crash into the mountains and die. Instead of giving me a heart attack like I'd have guessed, it made me instantly calm. What it did, actually, was make me think I was dreaming. My dreams, when centered around airplanes, consistently have the plane doing something bizarre, like flying low amongst mountains, so when I saw the snowy peak I figured, oh well, I'm dreaming and so we'll just drift down into an icy creek and then me and all the passengers will wander off out the plane windows and camp out in a nearby cave until the blue-footed, polka dotted bears show up. When we landed at the Orange County airport five minutes later without incident I was fairly shocked. And disappointed at the lack of creativity that my imagination bothered to invest in my dream.

And then I went off and did Serious Prospective Graduate Student Visiting Day stuff for 2 days, which felt like even more of a dream.