Maimed Writer and Nuclear War.

I had a dream that consisted of two unrelated vignettes:

First, there was a young man with very short hair. He seemed fairly average and had been walking down an evening street when an entourage of armed men sped up beside him in a car. They kind of presented their armament, and they were all confident and threatening.

The young man actually drew a gun, and at some point one of the men in the car seized his hands, and forced him to drop it. They kind of taunted him before pulling him into the car.

From that point they savagely beat him and tortured him. I know at some point they ran a straight-razor over the man's eyes, and then proceeded to throw his unconscious body from the moving car.

The man survived and proceeded to write a book about it. Half of his face, after surviving, was covered in severe road-rash where it had met the pavement after being tossed out the car and the whole of his head was encased in a supportive brace, so I imagine that's the reasoning behind the half-censoring of its cover: the cover was what I presume to be half a photograph of his face after the incident. His eye is sliced, and rolled into the back of his head, as he's presumably unconscious, and you can see the tattered beginnings of the other half.

I don't know what he titled it.

Shortly after that, an unrelated side-story began. My little sister and myself were in a hotel when the lights flickered. A loud explosion resounded and the sirens, a briefly-lived television warning, and overwhelming light told us it was nuclear.

We hid in the shower of the apartment. It was the safest place to be if the building collapsed and we had no fallout-shelter in the immediate vicinity.

Everyone had apparently survived but New York was kind of an irradiated shell of its former self. Afterwards, people were dying to radiation, but were trying to continue on as if it never happened.
At some point, I actually walked to a local pizzeria where I'm somewhat well-known for always arriving in shorts regardless of the weather, as I jog there.

One of the workers - an older man with silver hair and a light beard - had tuffs of his hair falling out and looked rather somber. The other - a rotund, usually cheery, and bald man - simple regarded me from a pizza and said, "Why are you here?"

At this point, my alarm went off, I woke up, and left for the Gym. It's worth noting I did not have any nightmare-style awakenings.

In a slightly amusing side-note despite my recent frequency of bizarre dreams, I have passed my mental evaluation for military service with flying colors.