Visions in the Dark

This is the third dream I had on September 21st, 2009.


I am at Lake Whittaker, the trailer park my parents go to every weekend in the summer. The park looks as it did as I remember it when I used to go there regularily with my parents when I was younger. My parents and I are in our old 1986 Westfalia and are parked down the hill, a few lots away from our actual trailer in a lightly forested area. The forest is similar to the one my aunt was dragging me through in the previous dream. Many of the lots surrounding the one we are on are occupied and everyone is inside their trailers or cars because there is a large brown bear on the loose.

The creature is going from lot to lot roaring and scratching and shaking the trailers like it is trying to get in. When it comes to our Westfalia my dad tries to put it in reverse and drive away but the bear has no problem grabbing onto the vehical and keeping us in one spot. It shakes the van violently and almost flips it over before losing interest and walking over to another trailer and attacking it. Several men, including my father, sneak out of their vehicles and quietly make their way over to a creak to the left of where we are. There are men handing out semi-automatic weapons to kill the bear. Many people are armed and head back towards the lots where the bear was causing trouble but it is now nowhere in sight. I am relieved because, even though I was scared, I did not want to see one of nature's creature be injured or killed.

Some time has passed and the trailer park is still trying to recover from the bear attack. Trailers, vehicles and trees have been badly damaged and many peopler are still trying to clean up their lots and repair the damage done to their property. I am at the park by myself now as my parents and the Westfalia are gone. I am walking from lot to lot looking for large peices of wood, either as fuel for a fire or peices large enough to carve. I come across a lot where a medium sized, grey barked tree has been felled and a man who looks like a young Steve Smith (Red Green) is cutting it into sections. Beside his trailer lot is a cemetary containing small gravestones dating from recent times back to hundreds of years. The graveyard is surrounded by a low iron fence and much of it is covered in autumn leaves that have fallen to the ground. I look around a bit before I start helping the man section the tree but I have a small hatchet while he has a chainsaw.

The man's wife, a portly woman with short blond hair lights a coleman stove and cooks up some hotdogs. Many people come to eat but the woman doesn't offer the food freely and people have to pay. Apparently many people in the trailer park are starving because they haven't been able to get their own food because they have been too busy trying to make repairs their lots, or as the case with many of them, for some reason they do not know how to cook. I realize that I myself am very hungry but only have small change on me and cannot afford a hotdog. The dream gets blurry and I cannot remember a bit but there is someone about me freely giving what change I have to the lady, but not getting a hot dog, but not being bothered by it.

Because I am starting to stave I decide to go fishing in the lake. I stand on the shore at the boat launch and try to catch some fish, even small crappies because I am so hungry. Three or four people come down to where I am to watch me fish, hoping that I will give them some of my catch. I do catch three small fish and take them back to my trailer to skin and cook, but because I am not the greatest at preparing fish and because they are so small I do not get much meat off of them and what meat I have I give to some of the starving people in the park because they cannot fend for themselves and I feel bad for them.

I am starting to feel delerious because of lack of food and manage to capture three or four black cats that I noticed appear around my trailer. I calmly capture them, knock them on the back of the head to kill them (like you would with a fish) and start skinning them like I would a fish. After skinning them and cooking the cats I eat my fill of meat and have enough to share with some other hungry people. In the back of my mind I am appalled at what I have done, but another part of my mind thinks that it was okay to kill and eat the cats because I was starving. I do not feel too upset though at what I have done but I remember wishing that things could have turned out differently.


The dream ends there.

This dream starts off with me as a passenger of a very old fashion car that looks like a vintage Model T without the canopy. The vehicle is severely lop-sided as the front left tire is normal, but the front right axel sports two tiny tires that look like they belong on a wooden pull wagon, not a car. I am in the backseat and the driver of the vehicle is a young woman dressed like a mennonite (in a pale beige dress), minus the bonnet to cover her light brown hair that has been pulled into a tight bun. I have on a grey mennonite dress as well but I think nothing of it in the dream even though I would never be caught dead in a dress in waking life. I know I am looking for something, but I an unable to say what, even when the young mennonite woman offers to help me search. It is for the search of that unknown thing that I have accepted a ride in her oddly designed car.

It is daytime and clear and we are somewhere deep in Southwestern Ontario's Mennonite country, as I remember it from childhood. It must of just stopped raining because the road is extremely bumpy and filled with deep muddy pits as well as various debris that looks as though it has been deposited in the middle of the road by a mud flow. I cannot remember asking the driver how we will get around all the debris and mud, though I do recall her saying that the old car was "tough and like a tank" and it could drive over, and through, anything. She proves this point when we come across what looks like a crushed silver sedan sticking out a shallow mud pit. The vintage vehicle seems to struggle a few times, especially with it's two tiny front wheels on the right side, but on the fourth or fifth attempt it is sucessfully able to drive over the crushed sedan.

There is a large white farmhouse a head of us in the distance that it sits in a depression in the landscape and is completely surrounded by water. The ground level of the building is no doubt flooded with water. As we drive closer the old vehicle slowly starts to become submerged and I am worried that it will stall, but it is strangely unaffected by the rising water level. The front door of the farmhouse opens as the driver parks the car and gets out. The woman who walks out of the farmhouse looks identical to the driver of the vintage car, only she is a bit taller and more corpulant, and is wearing a pale pink dress. It is obvious to me that they are sisters. The two of them seem completely oblivious to the muddy water that has flooded the entire farm even though it is knee deep.

They invite me into their home and allow me to look around at my leisure, but ask that I do not venture into the upper floors. While every room on the ground has been flooded, the water is relatively clean and clear, besides the occasional household object floating in it, unlike the murky and muddy water outside. In great contrast to the simplistic ideals of the mennonite lifestyle each room is decorated, even crammed, with old fashioned household items, knick-knacks, trinkets, oddities, toys and even the random out-of-place modern item, (like a brand new Spider Man plushie I found in a linen closet). Many of the rooms look more like a museum than a living space.

One stange thing I notice is that located in several rooms through the house there are three antique bisque dolls that have been tied together. The first group of three are all identical, dressed in earth tone Victorian fashion, blond curly hair and are tied toegther with what looks like twine. The doll on the far left is missing an eye. They are located in one of the first rooms, which I think is a lounge. The second group of three is located in what looks like a guest bedroom. The dolls are all identical looking with pale blue Victorian dresses, light brown hair and are tied together with a thin peice of red silk. The doll on the far left has a large crack down the middle of her face.

I find a narrow wooden staircase and sense what I am looking for up there. Before I go up I look through a nearby window and see a vast farmers field that is devoid of water and with large mounds spaced at regular intervals. Whatever is growing in the field is under the large mounds. I hear a faint "meow" and I suddenly realize/remember that I am looking for my cat Zrinyi. I quickly run up to the second floor and find her at the top of the stairs in a yellow cat carrier. There is a room beyond where I find my cat and the heavy wooden door is slightly ajar. I sneak a quick peek and see the last group of three dolls that are tied together. They are in what appears to be an old Victorian style office, sitting on the top shelf of a dark brown book case. The windows of the room have been boarded up and broken lines of light give little illumination to the heavily dusty room. The dolls have black dresses and are tied together with a thick peice of rope. None of the dolls have heads and the one on the far left looks as if it bled when the head was removed, as the white collar of it's dress has been stained red.

I hear one of the two sisters downstairs and quickly return to the ground level. I leave Zrinyi where she is and plan to return to get her. Now that I have found what I have been looking for, I am filled with a sense of urgency and desperately want to leave the farmhouse, but I suddenly feel like I am trapped and that I am not going to be allowed to leave. The sisters implore me to come and meet their father and brother. Up until this point I was unaware that there was anyone else in the house other than the two sisters since I had been through all the ground floor rooms and seen no one.

In a room that has suddenly appeared near the rear, right side of the house sits two men dressed in modern clothing on a modern sofa, staring at a large screen t.v with blank, glazed expressions on their faces. The sisters are frantically running back and forth trying to attending to every need and want of these men, and are completey ignored for their efforts. The room is heavy with anxiety and fear towards the two men, who have a dominating and meancing presence. I stand in one corner of the room and watch helplessly as the older of the two men (the father, I assume) starts to yell at the younger of the sisters for something, though I cannot remember what. He starts physically assaulting her and I yell at him to stop but he ignores me. Until I call him a "lazy misogynist," that is, then he turns is rage towards me and I flee from the room, but I am not scared and instead laugh, knowing that I struck a nerve and made the violent man react out of his own insecurity.

I run towards the narrow wooded stairs where Zrinyi is hidden, but instead I find the older of the two sisters at the bottom of the stairs holding the empty cat carrier. I realize at this point that the farmhouse is no longer flooded with water, but the floors have severe water damage and everything the water touched is now moldy and rotting. The older sister nods her head towards a nearby window and through it I can see the vast field that had the large mounds. It is newly plowed and through it runs hundred of black cats of all shapes and sizes. I think to myself "It's a black cat farm!" and know somehow that the cats had been grown from the field and where what was under the large mounds of dirt. I also realize that it is from my own black cat, Zrinyi, from which the "seeds" for these grown cats had been harvested, though I am not exactly sure how they did it.

I demand to know where my cat is but the woman in the pink dress just shrugs. She has a tired and worn look on her face. The dream becomes fuzzy at this point and I do not recall exactly how I found my cat, but I do so at some point, and try to flee from the farmhouse. The two sisters try to stop me but they tell me that they do not really want to, but will face further violence from their father if they do not try. I feel bad for the sisters, but I am tired of the entire place and just want to leave. I push them out of my way and storm out the front door which I first came through, with Zrinyi held tightly in my arms.