Them Bears

Dream Info: Saturday, April 4, 2009
Realism Intensity: 3
Content: PG-13

Up in the hills just outside of the city was a nice resort of sorts. It was set on the foot hills overlooking the valley.

People were strolling about in the warm sunshine. I was walking near the edge of the resort. The bushes moved and out clambered a large grizzly bear. He was several hundred feet up the road so I didn’t feel threatened. I just stopped walking and stared. The bear scratched itself and then started lumbering lazily towards me. I walked slowly backwards and then turned down a side street, into the resort, leaving before anything bad happened.

I saw no more of the bear. I had an urgent message for the owner of the resort, and continued on my way to her house forgetting about the oddity of a bear in this area.

As I drew close to the house, again the bushes shook ahead of me. I froze as the bear jumped out onto the road. It stood and roared. I was being stalked. Behind me, people stopped their morning walks and those at the café lowered the cups of cappuccino.

“Run. Get out of here,” I cried to them, then turned and fled myself. The crowd vanished into buildings. The bear rushed after me.

I was going to die, I knew it. And I ran fueled with fear. I outran a young boy who was wheezing with exertion. I looked over my shoulder as the bear, catching him, crashed and rolled on the ground; the boy clasped in its great claws. I was overjoyed. The boy distracted the bear which was allowing me to escape. What luck; I was going to live.

I stopped running, consumed with guilt. What had I just thought? That was terrible. So I turned and ran back. Against a building was a stack of chopped wood. I grabbed a log and hurled it at the bear. Again and again I threw. The bear drew back, startled by the sudden attack. Confused it retreated to the nearest trees leaving the boy on the ground. I rushed forward, lifted the boy, and together we ran inside a nearby building.

The building had several rooms and large glass windows. In fact, the door was glass. It wouldn’t keep a grizzly bear out long. I locked it as the bear sprinted from the trees towards us.

There were several people inside the store, a gift shop of sorts, who looked at us questioningly. I pulled everyone into the center of the room, away from the windows. The bear slammed into the door. The glass cracked but held. The bear battered angrily. I led everyone through the rooms to another door. But as we reached it, three more bears attacked. That door was glass as well. We were surrounded. I was shocked at how cunningly the bears had apparently planned this.

The first bear crashed through the door. One of the others had worked its way in through a window. The third and fourth worked on the back door. One had its paw through the bottom and was shattering the glass in a widening hole. The sound of roaring, breaking glass, and screaming filled my ears.

Then I woke up.

The Quarry

Dream Info: February 3, 2009
Realism Intensity: 6 (out of 10)
Content: PG

I stepped into the antechamber of a large stone mansion. Light spilled in from the wide doorway. There were no lights…no electricity of any kind, it appeared. The walls were bare stone, cold and solid.

I signaled my friend to follow me as I opened the next thick wooden door and stepped into the black chamber beyond. Cool light spilled into the room from several tall windows. My eyes quickly adjusted and I could see a large table with ornate chairs. Some large, soft, sitting chairs, a couch, and an enormous fireplace, empty but blackened. My friend closed the door behind us.

I walked around the room lifting objects here and there. There was no dust. My foot steps echoed until, in front of the fireplace, I came upon a thick, coarsely woven rug. High upon the walls were paintings. I stood below the nearest and tried to make out it in the dim light. It was a large oil painting and reminded me of something you would see in a catholic church.

Sudden light appeared in the corner. I jumped back. An old woman stood squinting at us with an oil lamp in her hand, raised slightly above her head.

“Eh, Mario, vieni qui. C’abbiamo dei ladri,” the woman croaked.

A tall skinny man promptly appeared in the hall doorway behind her. He had on an undershirt, worn pants, and sad slippers.

“Bah, Maria, non mi sembrano i ladri. Se non c’e di che, stai zitta e lasciami stare,” the man grumbled. He punctuated his sentence with a waved hand, dismissing us. Maria swatted his shoulder. He pushed her away and trundled back into the dark hall.

I assured the woman we were not thieves. We had no idea this mansion was inhabited and had come exploring.

She walked past me casually and mumbled, “Esploratori, son’ peggiore dei ladri.”

We befriended her and stayed for dinner. She and her husband were quite pleasant. I expressed how shocked I was to have found a structure such as their house in the United States. We don’t build with solid stone often. Maria recounted how their families had immigrated to the US and Mario’s father had started carving this house out of the cliff. It was carved from the living stone. No mortar, no seams; just one piece of stone, a sculpture of a house. They operated a quarry that Mario still ran. Maria’s father had come to the states and found work with Mario’s father. The two had met. The rest was history.

As she and her husband talked, I stared at the beautiful paintings in the flickering lamp light. The night grew late. They invited us to stay over.

The next morning, sitting in the back of Mario’s old pickup truck, my friend and I bounced as we pulled out of the mansion’s rocky driveway. We were headed up the canyon to the side of their house. Jolting back and forth I marveled and the large stone house buried deep with in the shadow of the cliff that surrounded it. Over the decades they had removed an impressive amount of stone. The sheer cliff rose for hundreds of feet. You could clearly see where Mario’s father and his brothers had started chiseling inward. They had removed the raw stone leaving their sculptured house.

The mountains pressed in around us. We drove under a high natural archway of stone. Vines dangled down. There were many strange rock formations. The trees were dense. Here and there we spied cracks and openings in the rocks; possible caves beckoning me to come explore.