My bedside clock reads 2139 hours and I’m jus’ awake from a very bizarre dream. I was running across the desert towards a bluff that overlooks what I believed to be a pond.

When I got to the edge, I jumped from the cliff towards the water. As I dropped to the surface, two things happened: I realized it wasn’t a pond, but the ocean and a gigantic electric eel came to the surface, swallowing me whole.

While I didn’t notice the lock-blade knife in my right hand while running, I did after being swallowed up. I used the knife to cut my way out of the eel, where I was then able wade ashore and walk home.

The dream ended abruptly as I reached for the door knob of my front door. And no — zero drugs or alcohol in my system — simply a lot of weirdness.

From my notes:  “Australia’s Courier-Mail reporters having spoken to Brian Hodge, who was in the room next to the Las Vegas murder. He states: “There were multiple people dead and multiple shooters. I was just hiding waiting for police to come get us. I got outside safely and was hiding in bushes. My floor is a crime scene. They killed a security guard on my floor.””

Photographer Brandon O’Neal was backstage during the music festival in Las Vegas, Sunday night. At first, he thought it was speakers on stage popping.

“It was so loud I put my hand over my ears and was like, ‘Oh my god, the speakers are about to blow up. And then everything just– everything stopped. No one knew where [the gunfire] was coming from. We had no idea where to go.”

O’Neal kept his camera rolling as he ran for his life, “We ran around the stage and we could hear bullets like whizzing by like – ricocheting. That’s when we made it to this exit to try to go to the parking lot and there was a cop car there so we went behind the cop car.”

In the chaos, a girl next to him was shot, “My friend and a couple of other people picked her up and brought her over to the police vehicle to just get her out of harm’s way. She just she wasn’t moving. I don’t think she made [it].”

Looking across the field, “You didn’t know if they were shot or not. I saw a bunch of people just laid out on the floor. I don’t really want to describe what I saw. It’s just — not good. When I wake up, [I’m] praying it was a nightmare and then it’s real.”

From my notes: “The Vegas murderer’s ‘companion’ is documented as Marilou Natividad-Bustos, in California, with a birthday of January 1962 — making her 55 years old. In Nevada, she’s registered as Marilou Lou Danley, with a birthday of December 1954 — meaning she would be 62. She also has two social security numbers.”

As an orthopedic surgeon from Big Sandy, Tennessee, Heather Melton is used to a certain amount of trauma. But the trauma of what happened Sunday night in Las Vegas is one she cannot repair.

She and her husband, Sonny were both attending the music festival. She survived, but Sonny, who shielded her from the bullets, was killed.

“He protected me. He saved my life. Sonny helped me through probably the most difficult time in my life. So I always say he saved me once, and now he has saved me again.

Big and Rich were playing, ‘God Bless America’ and the whole crowd was singing at the top of their lungs. Everybody had their phone lights up and it was just a really nice atmosphere. That was about an hour before the shooting started.

I actually turned to Sonny and I said, ‘Was that a gun?’ and he said, ‘I don’t think so,’ because the music was very loud. And then there came a longer series of shots and I said, ‘I think that’s guns.’ And then the third time it was even longer. And that’s when Jason Aldean ran off the stage.

I said to Sonny, ‘We just need to get down. And he said, ‘No, we can’t get down because we’ll get trampled.’ And that’s when he just wrapped his arms around me from behind and we started running. And that’s when I felt him get shot in the back and we fell to the ground. I couldn’t feel a pulse and there were still bullets flying all around us.

[Then] they actually shut the lights off of the stage and there was just darkness, and I could just see images around me of people on the ground, people running. It was like you were thrown into a battlefield.

Two men with a truck lifted Sonny from the field and took him to a nearby hospital. It wasn’t very long after they arrived at the hospital that Heather learned Sonny was gone.

“I was covered in Sonny’s blood. I was in so much shock and pain at the time that I felt like I couldn’t even breathe. [But] really in my heart, I feel like [his passing] happened on the field.

After he was pronounced, she leaned over, kissed him and hugged him, but because of another incoming trauma, “They asked me to leave and that was the last time I saw him. The hospital had a chaplain who came and spoke with me, and some other representatives who were trying to tell me about talking to the coroner, and the morgue, and whatever else needed to be done. But those things, they don’t register at that time.

And I just remember the homicide detectives walking in to talk to me, and I just wanted to run away. Like, ‘I don’t want to be the person you need to talk to,’ but I am. And finally, I don’t even remember what time it was, maybe 3:00 in the morning, they let us leave.

I told my children the next day. I wanted to tell them before they saw it on the news, and they’re completely grief-stricken. He was the best stepdad they could ever have, and he loved them like they were his own children.

I’m going back with two suitcases and my husband’s going to be in the cargo. This is not how I want to fly back with him. It’s just almost unbearable to think about. [But] I actually don’t have anger, but I refuse to even think about the demon that shot and killed so many people. I don’t even know his name, and I don’t want to know his name.”

As a child I was selfish, like most children. I had to be taught compassion.

As an adult, I thought I knew all about compassion and had to learn the hard way that I didn’t. In fact, it took me several lessons, via some hard-knock situations to realize that compassion is both an ongoing process and a subject that one cannot ever learn enough about.

There are still lessons in compassion to be learned. Sometimes we are the teacher, other times we’re the student.

Either way, we have a place of our own in the broad vista of life’s compassion.

From my notes:  ” FBI is suggesting the Vegas murderer’s mental state was deteriorating, that he had significant weight loss, an increasingly slovenly physical appearance and obsession with his girlfriend’s ex-husband.”

Visiting from Auburn, Washington, off-duty firefighter Dean McAuley was in Las Vegas to see a concert. Instead he ended up saving lives during the Sunday night attack.

“We started moving toward the center of the stage. Jason Aldean was out, and the crowd was just having a really good time. Then pops started happening, and it sounded like fireworks. It took me about 3-4 seconds to know it wasn’t fireworks. So we got down and a lot of people started getting down and we started to hear some screaming.

As soon as [Aldean] pulled his guitar off and was scrambling to get off stage, you could see sparks hitting the stage as well. Bullets were ricocheting. It was very clear it was an automatic weapon, and we could not determine where it was coming from. Just chaos and you could see people dropping, and you could hear people screaming.

As soon as there were was a break, we got up, but the break was very minimal. Knowing what we know now, [the gunman] was probably switching guns and started he again and we went down. We could still see people coming our direction trying to get out, and you could see people dropping. He continued to shoot, we could hear people screaming for medics; screaming for help.

People were trying to get up over fences and there was nowhere to go – these fences were so high and kids were climbing up on these fences and just getting picked off by bullets because they were just falling off the other side. You could hear what was going on. We pulled one girl into our group and we kept hearing: ‘I need help, I need help!’ That was probably the hardest things I’ve ever experienced. We’re designed to help immediately.”

Explaining that when he had the chance to escape, he told a friend, “I told him I can’t, I have to go to work. I get to go to work, because I want to. There [wasn’t] a first responder there that didn’t want to go to work. [So] if you want a title of a hero, there were thousands of heroes there.”

Once inside the medical tent, McAuley described, “It’s a moment there I will never forget; looking at this off-duty firefighter – I don’t know his name – and we just both looked at each other and said, ‘Let’s go.’ We went out and emptied a big garbage wheelbarrow and came across another wounded victim. We loaded her into it; she had a pulse so we felt she was saveable, and raced her back to the tent.

At that point, the floor in the tent was something out of a war movie; lots of blood and lots of bodies. Best way I could describe it was just like a blood bath [because] we had bodies, a lot of bodies.

[In another instance a] pickup truck, I’ll never forget two people – a husband who was handing me his wife saying ‘She’s fine, she’s fine, you just have to get her in there.’ I had to check pulses and she didn’t have a pulse. That was the moment…that was really tough.

I really hope that [what] people get out of this is – there was one bad person, there were 30,000-plus amazing human beings, incredible human beings. There’s so much negativity in this world; and I hope that’s not what people get out of this – there were some remarkable people working together doing things – total strangers helping each other; people with no training wanting to help each other.

We all became one that night. There’s a lot of love in his world and a I got to see humanity in action. I got to see one person at their worst, but I got to see humanity at its best. We had hundreds of people willing to put their life on the line and get out there and help.”

From my notes:  “A source has let me know that law enforcement has a video of the Vegas murderer shooting from the hotel room. Apparently he set up a system to tape himself in the act. What a disconnect.”

It was a few minutes after 10, Sunday night when Brian Rogers’ cellphone went off. It was his daughter, Kaitlyn, who left her shift helping out at the ambulance’s medic tent to enjoy a bit of the country music.

“I expected she was calling to say good night. And she said, ‘Daddy, they’re shooting at me.’ That’s a big statement to make for somebody to get when they’re half asleep, so I don’t know that I reacted.”

A feeling of helplessness hit Rogers as he sped to the scene not even knowing if his youngest daughter was still alive.

“When I first arrived, there were people lying in the street, deceased. There were people running out of the venue covered in blood, and it was very hard to tell which ones were the patients versus which ones were the people helping them. It was chaotic.”

Meanwhile, Kaitlyn was in the medic tent, spiking IV bags as the space filled with the injured, “We didn’t know what was going on, really, outside of that tent. Just to have people that could look at me and say ‘We’re OK,’ and me to kind of return, that was just something that could kind of keep us going and keep our focus on a patient and not us.”

Days later, Rogers is still fighting with his feelings, “I’m going through a lot of the different emotions that you go through. I was, and I still am, very angry. I don’t know how something so evil could happen to so many people.

“I’m just trying to understand how and why, and I may never know. That’s the hardest part, never knowing, right?”

A friend is complaining that he’s been ‘catfished.’ I’m commiserating the best I can…

She pretended to be a she.
Had him hooked and on the line.
No tuna for him.

From my notes:  “Investigators are now trying to identify the mystery woman seen with the murderer in the days before the Las Vegas massacre.”

For Glen Simpson, Sunday night hadn’t been particularly eventful. An emergency medical technician, he was hired to provide medical services at the event.

“I got a radio call to go over to Gate 2A, specifically [to help a man who had to much to drink.] [At first] it sounded like power lines that were just hitting each other. It was longer, a little bit louder.”

The five Metropolitan Police Department officers walking alongside Simpson drew their weapons. He ducked.

“I just thought to myself, ‘What is this? Is this happening?’‘Is this the real thing?’”

Simspon never once saw where the bullet’s wer coming from,, “I could just hear it, and it echoed. I’d even say you could hear it hitting people, just listening to the way people were moaning and screaming and crying.”

Simpson, now in the field amid the carnage, called his mom and dad. Waking them from sleep, he said, “I love you,” then hung up.

He immediately went to work treating the wounded.

His head blazes skyward.
Loins burn explosive passion.
Her kisses quenching.