The Wood Pushers Meet the Killers, Mario & Luigi

I really wish I could remember how this dream began. The beginning was particularly wacky, involving superheroes and my family and I living on a deserted island with carnivorous dinosaurs.

I recalled these sequences in some detail after I woke up, but I went too long without recording them, so now those details are lost. 😒

The dream proper I do recall quite well. It was another one of my frustrating "back to high school" dreams.

IRL, there's a hallway showcasing photos of all past graduates. In the dream, however, only grads from the last thirteen years were represented; grad photos from 1960-2005 were tucked away inside a folder, which was sealed in a glass case on the wall. This flustered me greatly, as I wanted to see the '05 grad photos.

(that's the year I would've graduated IRL if life hadn't bent me over a table).

Thwarted, I left, taking care to hide my face from any teachers/counsellors/etc. who would've recognized me as I crept along the halls. As I stepped outside, I peeled off my shirt and discarded it; this drew the attention of douchebag jocks, who started heckling me over my copious back hair and less-than-trim physique as I left school grounds.

As I entered downtown, I found myself in a heavily industrial area (IRL, no such area exists in my hometown). There I stumbled upon four old casual friends/acquaintances/occasional enemies from my high school years who were on their lunch break. We got to talking, and I came to mention my mother's heart attack, my late father's cancer, and that we were constantly in need of firewood to heat our shanty. This is when they informed me they were wood pushers — i.e. sellers of illegally acquired firewood. They agreed to sell  me a cord if I met them at the abandoned power plant where their deals went down.

Deep down in the power plant's humid, musty, rusty innards I met up with the four guys. There I learned from them their supplier had given them crappy apple wood. Taking a piece, one of the guys deposited it on the ground for me to examine; though it resembled a ruptured potato, I thought it looked perfectly burnable. Then we heard commotion outside. Telling me to stay put, the four left to see what the deal was. Minutes passed. There was loud shouting, cursing, then abrupt silence. More minutes passed. One of the four returned, panicked. He told me a pair of contract killers employed by rival wood pushers had killed his friends, were coming after him, and that we had to get to safety quick.

I followed him deeper into the plant. As we came upon a final door, I saw strong light coming from behind it and assumed it was a back exit. Instead it was a small, cramped room containing empty lockers, a medical examination table, and other detritus; there were no doors or windows to escape through and no decent spot to hide. The guy was skinny enough to squeeze into a locker, but I was too big to fit in any. He hurriedly told me to hide under the two foam mattresses stacked atop the examination table; I hurriedly secreted myself under the mattresses just as the killers came through the door. Somehow I could see right through the mattresses and hence see the two killers. They were Hispanic/Latino (they spoke in Spanish/Portuguese), dressed as Mario and Luigi, and armed with flamethrowers.

As you can very well guess, they knew someone was hiding in that there room. While I remained still, hoping beyond hope they hadn't noticed me and thought my comrade was the only person in the room, he left his hiding spot, offering to cut a sweet deal in exchange for his life. They agreed, but only as a fake-out; once his guard was down, Ersatz Luigi toasted him with his flamethrower.

Now it was just me, clumsily hidden beneath two mattresses, a pair of merciless killers armed with deadly weapons standing before me, blocking off my only escape route. I didn't know if they knew I was there and didn't know if they wouldn't torch the place regardless. That's when my body forced me awake.

[Un]Charmed

It was the late '80s-to-early '90s. A trio of young boys

were luring/rounding up the other neighbourhood kids to their basement, where they tortured/murdered them. The three boys, not being normal mortals, had bewitched the adults into inaction.

This left the neighbourhood kids to their own devices. In time, a large group of kids attacked the trio. Cornering the three in their own basement, the neighbourhood kids mutilated them – dismembering and disemboweling them – before tossing their still-living bodies onto a funeral pyre. It turns out the three boys weren’t really as young as they seemed. They were warlocks, hundreds of years old, who had kept themselves young and alive through sorcery. As their bodies burned, the magic which sustained them was nullified; their entrails and hacked off limbs rapidly aged and decayed into nothing as the centuries caught up with them.

The dream ended on a non-sequitur. A wooden bench which had some nebulous connection to the trio morphed into a pseudo-werewolf. Then a real werewolf showed up, forced the pseudo-werewolf into a corner, and tried enticing it with a cookie into performing a back-flip. When the pseudo-werewolf refused to perform the trick, the werewolf tore it to pieces.

The Infamous Lake Country Wildfire of '17

I, my parents, and my sister were out visiting neighbours when a wildfire sparked off to the east of us. It was so intense, it sent a veritable pillar of flame into the sky, a thick blanket of gray smoke unfurling to cover the firmament. The fire was very close — several hundred metres away at most — and due to its ferocity, it was believed it would grow beyond control and overtake our homes before fire fighters could arrive to contain it.

Fearful for the fates of my pets and belongings, against the warnings of all others, I took off in a dead run for home to collect who and what I could in the short time allotted. Something then happened to me, something which knocked me out cold. When I came to in the hospital, weeks had gone by. From my family, I learned that our home had been caught in the fire; all our possessions had been destroyed and one of our dogs had died.

The dream then jumped forward in time ten or twenty years. I found myself cutting across the grounds of the UBC Okanagan campus, where I crossed paths with one of the female students.

(She was the spitting image of Keegan Connor Tracy.)

I inquired if she knew of the infamous Lake Country Wildfire of '17; she said she did. I then asked her if she'd like to come with me to visit the old neighbourhood; she said she did. Together, we made the trip on-foot to my old neighbourhood. The townscape had transformed considerably since the 2010s. For example, where there had once been a small church now stood a series of Arby's restaurants.

(Arby's had transitioned from a chain of sandwich restaurants to a Dairy Queen clone in the intervening decades.)

Arriving on the site of where my house had stood, we found no remaining trace of it. In its stead were several white houses and sheds, some enveloped in clear plastic, all smouldering. There was even a Chow Chow lying on a front yard who was ashy and smoky.

(He was alive and uninjured in spite of this (I suppose some dogs are just more fire-retardant than others.).).

My companion pondered on how the area could still be smouldering after all these years; I gave an existential answer about how the location still retained the memory of that fire in its soil or something poetic like that, but I knew what was happening was truly the direct result of a recent wildfire.