Visions of death

I've been having problems lately with vivid paranoid thoughts. Not the typical "someone's spying on me" or "someone's out to harm me" kind that I usually have. These are thoughts that play out like dreams in my head that basically scare the crap out of me. They started sometime back, and I'd hoped by now they would have stopped, but yet they continue to invade my head every chance they get.

They were particularly strong while we were driving to and from Cleveland. Like scenes in a horror movie, but involving current sights and sounds, I'd envision bloody, painful disasters resulting in my own death. Most happened as I was driving past various flatbed trucks loaded with items that could surely crush a human to death or while driving on bridges over various rivers.

I'd see a truck carrying a cargo of metal bars that were about 20 ft in length and picture one of them flying off the truck and impaling me thru the chest. Or as I was on a bridge I'd suddenly get a vision of losing control of the car, flipping over the concrete barrier and plummeting down to the water below. Each time death wasn't instantaneous though. My suffering was slow and agonizing, and I was acutely aware of the life draining from my body as the seconds ticked by.

Since we've been back, the "visions" have changed to match the environment I drive in each day. I see myself getting shot in the head as I'm driving along, the apparent victim of road rage or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Of being caught at a gas station as the place mysteriously explodes into a raging fireball.

The one that has me most trouble and fearful right now, the only one that doesn't involve driving, is that our plane is going to crash when we go to or from New Jersey in just about 4 weeks. I wonder if I picked the right seats for the flight there, ones that would offer the best chance of survival should the plane crash (we don't get to pick seats for the return flight until the day we return). This isn't a random thought that comes to mind once in a great while though. Each time I see a travel commercial or a show that has planes it it, if I see a plane in the sky or each time I drive past O'hare Airport, I go into a panic attack.

I can't seem to extricate these thoughts, these visions from playing in my head. I don't know why they're happening. I've had this happen occasionally in the past, but never so continuously and never so vividly. No wonder my anxiety kicks into high gear each time I need to leave the house.