Final Countdown

My brain really messes with me sometimes. I had a long complicated dream this morning, all of which was weird, but the end of which was especially screwy:

I was a kid, about 16 years old. I emerged from some kind of teleportation device in the living room of the family home. Previously I had just been outside another house, several miles away, and seen a huge redwood tree fall over. It might have hit a building nearby but I wasn’t sure.

I walked from the living room to the kitchen. My sister was there, and she followed me. Outside we found my brother. He was standing in the grass between the road and the house, looking into the distance. I followed his gaze and saw a big column of smoke a few miles away. Looks like the tree had hit something after all, and started a fire.

Between us and the smoke was thick forest, of mixed trees. Redwoods and pines and oak trees all growing among each other. Unlike my sister and brother, I could fly. I took off at a run and launched myself into the air. I could only go about eight feet above the ground, but it was enough to speed me towards the smoke. I followed the road at first, but it turned away so I went into the forest, and then passed over a shallow lake. At the far side of the lake was a thick group of oak trees, all covered with moths, to the point where I saw more moth wings than leaves. All the moths had their wings folded like they were Monarch butterflies resting mid-migration.

I took this in, then saw smoke drifting around the trees. Looking down I saw tiny points of firelight on the ground, as though the fire was spreading like some kind of underground organism, sending little shoots upward to emerge from the leaf litter like mushrooms. Each little fragment of fire glowed and moved like a flower, and just grew bigger without actually spreading to the leaves around it. Well weird.

Turning around in mid-air I looked back across the lake, and saw little points of fire emerging from the shore, moving around the edge of the lake and towards the road, and my house beyond. I could hear my brother and sister in the distance, yelling and running around. They were stomping on the tiny fires, trying to drive them back from the house. I couldn’t save these moth-covered trees but perhaps I could help save the house. I flew back over the lake.

When I got to the house, it was getting dark. Little bits of fire were smoldering all over the ground, which was wet as though it has just rained. I couldn’t find my brother or sister, but I could hear them both shouting nearby in the forest. I half-ran, half-glided in their direction. The forest canopy closed overhead. The ground was very uneven. Huge decayed stumps poked out of the ground, some with holes in them, filled with leaf litter or open like animal dens, leading down. I passed clusters of massive fiddlehead ferns. There were still points of firelight on the ground, but fewer now. I could hear my bother and sister shouting ahead of me. Then I paused, and listened closer, and realized their voices weren’t coming from ahead... They were coming from below.

And they were oddly distorted and wordless, as though it wasn’t them, but some kind of creature making sounds to mimic them. All of a sudden I realized something in the forest, or perhaps the forest itself, was trying to kill me. It wanted me to crawl into one of these holes and get trapped.

"Where are you?" I shouted, hoping that my actual brother or sister would respond. I turned back in the direction I thought I’d come, towards the house, but there seemed to be more low branches. I couldn’t fly so I slogged across the ground, through increasingly thick leaf litter. The ground was very uneven and messed with my sense of direction. "Where are you?" I shouted again.

That’s when I heard them both again. Their voices were strangely echoing, and they spoke in unison:

"We’re behind you."

I knew it was a trick. The forest was trying to make me spin around and lose my sense of direction. I struggled through the branches, but there were even more branches beyond them. I was getting more tangled. At the corners of my eyes I could see an indistinct light, growing. It didn’t illuminate anything around me. I just seemed to be interfering with my own ability to see the branches I was trying to move. Some kind of faerie-light? A will-o-the-wisp coming towards me? I had no idea. I heard my not-brother and not-sister again: "We're behind you..."

I stopped struggling. I was done for. Whatever was after me had won. The light at the edges of my vision grew and grew, and the forest receded into darkness.

Abruptly I realized I was awake, and looking at the darkness of the inside of my face mask. The mask had been displaced, and what I’d thought was faerie-light in the dream was actually daylight leaking in around the edges.

Now, there are a lot of questions I could ask about that, but the biggest one I have is: Why, brain? Why take an already weird dream and turn it into a freaking horror movie?