There's never any death or even significant destruction in these dreams, but generally it's kind of dark and dreary, and the real conflict in these dreams is that I'm always looking for someone. When I was in high school (yeah, I've been having this dream that long), I was never looking for anyone in particular, but in the last ten years or so I'm always looking for my wife, Stephanie.
There are always other people I know that I run into, mostly family members and some friends, but I always bypass them and keep looking for Steph. I'm never in an outright panic in these dreams, but rather I try to play like everything's cool, and I'll hook up with her pretty soon. If I stay sleeping long enough, sometimes I find her, and other times I don't. In those cases where I wake up, I try to fall back asleep to continue the dream.
I try to look at the dream from some kind of abstract point of view, to figure out what it means, but I never really arrive at any conclusions.
In some instances there are some peripheral details or sub-plot. Last night, I had to get some children into a shelter just before the blast. Then I saw the blast, but it was more like a theme park special effect than an actual nuclear explosion. After that, I ran into my aunt and uncle who had parts of a Huss Enterprise ride to put together, so the kids could ride it. Some guy, someone from the neighborhood I guess, didn't want me to put it together, and the kids were sad.
A shrink could have a lot of fun with my dreams.
His house was built as a tower. The tower had a spiral slide in the center of the house, which provided means from getting to different rooms. His room was the very last "stop". He kept missing his room and this would result in his death, or something tragic like that.
Dreams are great...