The sun had quite suddenly gone nova during the night, and the far side of the world had already been destroyed, completely burnt to a crisp. Now the sky was beginning to warm and pweent and I were running about the downtown area of some city trying to find our wives and children before dawn (and the destruction it would bring) arrived. People were panicking everywhere, running about. It was still pretty dark out but the temperature was already rising, as if we were in the heart of a brutal desert. I looked to my right at one point, towards the eastern horizon, and I could see the huge solar flares which were leaping off the sun, they were becoming visible and the sun was just minutes behind it.
We found C. and my two (maybe three?) kids gathered together in a sort of culvert or tunnel. Grabbing them, we ran towards a nearby sort of cathedral-warehouse building. Pweent was on the edge of breakdown as we still had not found his family, despite the fact that we knew they were somewhere nearby. But there was no more time; the quality of light suddenly changed. All the color leeched out of everything as the brightest white-hot light began to rise on every surface. There were no shadows, because everything was reflecting light on everything else. It was the brightest, cleanest light I have ever seen; it threatened to cut through my mind like a physical blade, but then we made it through the door of the cathedral-warehouse just as they were slamming it shut and I could hear things bursting into flames behind me.
Just as the door shut, there was a huge roar outside as the heat washed over the city, and I could hear everything groaning and creaking as it expanded from the heat. I could hear other, lesser buildings in the downtown area cracking, shattering, exploding. All the windows had been solidly covered over in this building but even so there were places here and there where a tiny crack or pinhole allowed the shocking light to leak in. People worked busily to cover these bits up with anything they could, as if somehow any light at all allowed into the building would cause the whole thing to collapse, as if the light was poison, or water filling a boat. The large space was full of people, and cots, like an emergency shelter, but we plunged it into darkness and listened to the storm of sunlight outside, expecting every second that this building might fail like the others, that a crack would burst open in a wall and then we'd be swept away on a tidal wave of light.
Then, eventually, the day had passed. The noise faded and the temperature began to go back down. I pressed my hand against the door and it wasn't so hot that I couldn't keep it there, so we opened the door to see how bad things were. It was completely and totally pitch black. There was no moon, no stars; perhaps the former had been completely destroyed, blown to dust, but more likely there was a deep thick layer of ash and smoke in the atmosphere, blotting out everything. I began to crawl across the ground, which was covered in hot rubble.
Then I felt something come up and bite at my hand! It was like a rat or something, mammalian. I flung it away reflexively, upset at first... but then I realized that if a stupid rat had survived out there in the destruction, surely some other people besides ourselves had as well. Slowly my eyes somehow adjusted to the total darkness and I could see the vague shapes of the shattered, ruined city. Pweent gathered some supplies together, some food and such, determined to travel around and see where others had survived, to find his wife and children. I could not go with him-- C. and I were going to stay at this shelter-- but I knew I could not talk him out of going. I only hoped he found somewhere safe again by morning...
...
Then the dream jumped to a century or two later. Humanity had survived somehow, and now the human race basically lived entirely in submarines and in submerged cities built into the walls of the continental shelves, sheltered from the still-murderous sun. Everyone migrated annually, clustering near whichever pole was in six months of darkness. The equinoxes were the riskiest time of the year, as everyone was in transit and there was nowhere that was safe from the sun for more than twelve hours.
There were basically two nations, existing in a state of competition and indirect cold war for the minimal remaining resources-- the best-sheltered places in the ocean, basically. One nation was Western in nature, people of the Americas and Europe. They were fairly numerous-- perhaps as many as a few million-- and well-equipped because their ancestors had had enough time in the hours before sunrise to find real shelter and lay in some supplies. The other nation was Eastern, asian-- smaller in population but much, much tougher, because they were descended from people who had been under the sun when it first flared, people who hadn't had any time to prepare for the destruction that rained down on them. I was watching a big board, a big map of the world, showing all the various submersibles of both nations make the Equinox Migration. (I don't know exactly who I was here; some descendant of myself from the first part of the dream.) As I was watching, suddenly a terrible thing happened: some of the submarines from one nation (I don't remember which) began attacking the others. The cold war was turning hot, and a terrible feeling came over me as I realized that once this fighting broke out everywhere, it could literally end up killing every last human on the planet, because our existence was so fragile still, but there was nothing I could do but watch as one by one, submarines vanished off the screen as they were destroyed...