A Strange Dream

Last night I had one of the strangest, yet most convincing and compelling dreams, I’ve had in years.

I was in a pleasant mall somewhere in southeast Asia. It was one of those malls that ambles and has short sets of stairs and the way meanders instead of taking you in a some orbit around the centre. I came to this one set of stairs with a car on it. The car was badly accordioned in the front, as if it had hit the stairs at high speed. The front end was pretty much just rust, as if it had been there for decades. The right side of it was pressed up against a flowered abutment. People just went around it. Then I noticed there was a skeleton inside it. I noticed another car further ahead. This one had a family of skeletons in it.

Someone started talking about the whole thing and it turned out there’d been some kind of disaster. The man said “if only they’d driven faster, they wouldn’t have been inundated”. I took that to mean the place had flooded. The cars, the bodies… they’d just been left there. If there were more victims visible, I don’t remember, but I suppose there must have been.

Then it turned out it had actually been a poison gas attack. Four NATO fighters had attacked the mall with missiles… one of them was Canadian. The missiles were small spheres, softball-sized grenades of some sort. In the dream, I saw a the planes fly up to me, launch the missiles… my viewed followed them down into the mall, where they swept up to three women in combat fatigues. The middle one reminded me of Sigourney Weaver. She caught one of the balls with a smug, derisive look, but quickly realized she was choking. They all began to run, but they couldn’t get away. Then I saw panicked people driving their cars in the mall itself, trying to get away, smashing into the stairs, dying.

At the end of the dream, crews began clearing the cars and skeletons away. It was as though my notice and my interest had shamed them into finally acting to do due diligence. I remember being a little miffed because I wanted to look them over more… shameless rubbernecking. That was pretty much it. Strange dream, but it felt surprisingly real at the time.