Visions in the Dark

I am at my parent's trailer park at Lake Whittaker, in late fall. It is cold and everyone has to dress warmly. Despite the fact that the park should be closed this time year, it is busy and there are people everywhere. In the center of the park lays a large parking lot and it is lined with row after row of picnic tables at which hundreds of students have been shuttled in, by old fashioned taxi cabs, for some art lessons. My friend Becky was with me and I showed her around the trailer park when we got there. I spent a lot of time reminiscing about "how the park use to be," because in waking life there have been many drastic changes since I used to go there as a kid.

Outside the parking lot and lurking in the forests beyond it was dangerous because monsters like orcs and oversized owls and bats where lurking around. Occasionally the students where attacked and everyone had to take shelter unter the picnic tables or in gazebos nearby. My friend Becky and I had a trailer in the northern most part of the park and when we went there we found a variety store and gun shop where the playground used to be.

The frequency and brutality of the monster attacks suddenly increased but Becky and I somehow had magic powers that we hid from everyone else that allowed us to make the orcs or giant owls disappear. I do not remember how or why we had these powers. There was one time when a group of students went to hide in the variety store to escape a monster attack. A giant owl perched on the small building's roof and began pecking away at building with it's giant sharp claws. The building was stronger than it looked however and the giant bird eventually gave up and flew away.

Soon after a band of orcs attacked some students taking art lessons in the large central parking lot, but by now most students had acquired fire arms from the gun shop and they made short work of the spear and sword weilding monsters. Only a small number of students were injured or killed. The art lessons continued and because of the commotion some seats had been moved around, including mine. I was no longer able to sit beside Becky and I was upset but there was nothing I could do about it. Some of the people there gathered the bodies of the dead orcs, threw them in a large green trashcan and set the whole mess on fire. The stench was horrible.

The students sitting at the picnic tables were given giant sheets of paper to draw on but I forgot something (my pencil?) and I had to venture back to my trailer to get it. I had to go alone because all of the other students had all of their supplies and could start their project right away. I cut through the southern end of the park (called the tenting area because only tents are allowed there) for a short cut and at first forgot that trailers where not allowed in that part of the park. There were a hole bunch of "weekenders" in the tenting area and most of them had small trailers. I wandered around in a confused daze, before I remembered where, I was because I was trying to find my trailer admidst the weekenders trailers and I could not understand at first why I could not find it.

As I continued through the tenting are and up to the seasonal area in the northern end of the park I passed by many people, one of whom was my uncle Alex. I thought I said something to him as I passed but he ignored me and disappeared amoung the gatherings of people in the tenting area. I arrived at my trailer but instead of going inside I entered a small tent that had appeared just outside of it. Though the tent had just suddenly appeared I acted as if it had been there the whole time. Some people I knew in the park when I was a kid suddenly show up. They are twin boys I used to play with but I can no longer remember their names, though I know their father's name, Kerry, and I refer to the twins as "Kerry's twins."

One of the boys almost literally dives into the tent as I exit, while the other twin paces back and forth between trailers trying to look inconspicuous. An older man with an artificial leg comes hobbling down the road towards the Kerry's twins and I. He is the variety store owner and when the twins see him they try to hide by lying still. When the older man has completely passed by the twin hiding in the tent reveals that the sweater he is wearing is full of stolen goods from the variety store, but the boy swears he didn't mean to steal anything. He said he was gathering things to purchase when a giant bat attacked the store and instead of dropping the items, he shoved them in his sweater. After telling me their story the boys walk away and head towards the tenting area in the southern end of the park. I do not see them again in this dream.

As I walked back towards the art lessons going on in the central parking lot I walked along the main road (rather than take a short cut through the tenting area) and noticed large cube shaped indentations in the road. Some people where digging these large brick shaped sections of road to improve their own trailer areas for some reason. Doing this made the road all but impossible to drive and and very difficult to walk on and I ended up walking alongside the road rather than on it.

Back at the art lessons, Becky and I completed our project and were told that we were now allowed to leave. It suddenly became very cold and it started snowing. This caused a mass exodus of students to begin leaving the park, but rather than wait for the old taxi cabs, the students opted to walk. Instead of heading towards the trailer park's exit, I asked Becky to follow me down to the lake, where the old taxi cabs and a bunch of other cars were parked. I broke into one car that was painted dark red on its front and sides but bright yellow on the back.

Since I don't know how to drive I let Becky get into the driver's seat but something went wrong and she almost drove off the dock and into the lake at first. I can't remember what had caused the near miss but both Becky and I had a good laugh about it. We drove towards the camp's exit and along the way many students tried to flag us down for a ride but we ignored them all.

Becky started driving faster, going 45 MPH in a 15 MPH zone and I told her several time to slow down because I was afraid that we would hit one or more of the students walking along the road. The closer we got to the gatehouse the more crowded the road became and Becky was forced to slow down. The large groups of students trying to leave the park were running into large groups of people trying to get into the park, and strangely, all of the new arrivals seemed to be mothers with babies or toddlers.

Because of all the snow on the road the car we were in acted more like a skidoo and we had fun to fishtails and spinouts and stuff on our way back to the city. The closer we came to our destination the more that scenery changed from that of a rural Ontario winter highway to that of an alternate reality where everything had a purple or blue-ish hue and the snow disappeard to be replaced with strangely oversized tropical plants. Becky and I had to remove our winter layers of clothing because we became overheated.

I wanted to find a way back to the cold Ontario highway we had just left but there wasn't anyway back that I could see and for some reason it was physically impossible to turn our half dark-red, half yellow taxi cab around. We drove for some time and came to the edge of a futuristic looking city that had many twisting roadways and neon lights.

The people walking the streets and driving around in this neon city looked like normals humans except for the fact that their skin tones matched the blue and purple hues found in the tropical plants outside of the city. Becky pulled the cab over and I tried asking several people how to get back to London Ontario (our hometown) but no one in the neon city knew what we were talking about because they had never heard of such a place. Becky and I were also the recipient of a lot of strange stares, I'm guessing because of our different coloured skin to that of everyone else in the neon city. For some reason we picked up a blue skinned man and a violet skinned woman and let them sit in the back of our taxi cab. For some reason they too wanted to find a way out of the futuristic neon city as well, though I did not ask why.

I started having anxiety attacks from being lost in the strange alternate reality city, and greatly feared not being able to find our way home. We came to an intersection in the center of the city and two normal skinned men, dressed in black suits, stopped us and somehow knew that Becky and I were lost and they said they that they could help us but did not say how they would do so. The two men were of middle age and dressed in black suits, like MiBs or something. Indeed, one looked exactly like Tommy Lee Jones while the other man looked like Agent Smith from the Matrix trilogy (played by Hugo Weaving).

The blue and purple couple in the back of the cab were spooked by the men in black and quickly departed. Becky and I were a little perplexed but said nothing as the men sat themselves in the back of our multicoloured cab. We drove around the neon city in silence for a while before the man in black who looked like Tommy Lee Jones suddenly exited the vehicle at a stop light and disappeared into the night. That left the man who looked like Hugo Weaving and though I did not learn his name in the dream, I will refer to him as "Mr. Smith" anyway.

We drove around some more before Becky suggested getting something to eat. We pulled into a neon-sign adorned coffee shop and Becky and Mr. Smith went inside while I waited in the car. When they returned Mr. Smith had bought me a tea and despite never having met before, he knew exactly how I liked it (Earl Grey, one milk, bag in). I didn't say anything about it and neither did he.

We ate/drank in the taxi cab but when we wanted to get going again, the three of us started walking down the neon sign lined street rather than drive. We came to a series of darkend alleyways and Mr. Smith insisted that we try to find our way through them. We walked for a while and came to a dead end where Mr. Smith cornered us. He said that he could not let us change the future and that he had to stop us. Becky and I had no idea what the heck he was talking about.

Mr. Smith pulled a black hand gun on us and raised the weapon to shoot, but before he could fire a misty blue hazy dropped down on him from somewhere above and he dissolved into nothing with a terrible scream. Becky and I quickly found our way back to the main streets which were now glowing neon like the signs, partly because it had started to rain and there was lots of reflections, but also because some parts of the road seemed to have absorbed the neon signs or something and the pavement was glowing brightly as if it was made of coloured gas (neon lights).

We eventually came to a neon tunnel in the side of a large building and started walking through. Becky said she could not hear anything when I asked, but I swore I could hear Mr. Smith's voice talking to us even though he was nowhere to be seen. I cannot remember what he was saying now but it was making me nervous and I was trying my best to hurry Becky along.


There is a bit more to the dream; something about a maze and a bunch of doors or something and getting back to our multicoloured cab and finding our way out of the neon city and back into the wintery Ontario landscape. At the end of the dream we didn't get back home but ended up stuck in a snow drift or something? I cannot remember anymore of this dream.