I’ve had chest pain since Sunday evening. It’s localized and hurts when I move, so I’m pretty confident that I did something moving around. It hurts to breathe, but it’s a dull ache. I’m not having trouble breathing—I’m getting enough air—but there is some discomfort. No, it’s not Covid-19—though I suppose it could be a toomah.

This being said, I slept in an odd position last night to accommodate for the pain, and as a result I had some peculiar “fresh” dreams. Fresh in the since that they were not the usual fare.

I’M THE BOSS NOW

My boss at work is my uncle by marriage. I’ve worked for him for fifteen years and I have no complaints. It’s a comfortable job, and I feel challenged though not completely fulfilled.

I used to spend a lot of time at my aunt and uncle’s house before they had a kid, and some after, and I did this mostly because they had a computer. I would play NHL ’96 for hours while they were at work or busy doing stuff. It was great.

Having spent so much time in that house, I dream about it often. They’ve lived to two other houses since then, but I always dream about that first one. It has been a while since I’ve had a dream about my uncle, though I see him five days a week.

In this dream, I was trying to get my boss to go to a shed where there was something important for him to see. I don’t recall what it was, just that I needed him to see it urgently. I needed him to do this so bad that I had stolen one of his guns—a 9mm.

When he saw that I had it, he laughed and remarked that I don’t know how to use a gun. Well, I don’t, but in the dream, I checked the clip, chambered a round, and fired it in the air. He visibly flinched when I did it, and then got angry when I pointed it at him. I took care not to have my finger on the trigger when I did this.

I marched him to the shed and along the way he told me that I was going to be punished and that he’d fire me for this. I told him that after he saw what I had to show him, jobs wouldn’t matter anymore. He opened the door to the shed and a bright light shone on his face, which was a face of a man in awe.

And then I woke up. No idea what it was.

RESPITE BY THE SEA

This dream began at a restaurant where I was a patron. It was more of a bar than a restaurant, as most of the dining establishments I frequent in my dreams are.

This was not one of my regular dream hangouts, though. This was a new place. I apparently knew the manager, who was a Kirstie Alley look alike (Cheers anyone?), and for whatever reason, they were short staffed. After I finished my drink, I offered to help and ended up behind the bar pouring drinks like I knew what I was doing.

After the shift, she thanked me and said she’d like to hire me on full time. I said okay but that I wanted to enjoy my vacation first.  She gave me a free drink and I walked out onto a patio which was hundreds of feet above a bay that stretched out to open sea. I could see coastal mountains in the distance, and yachts and sailboats dotted the blue water.

The restaurant/bar was built into a large rock formation connected to seaside cliffs by iron walkways. The patio I was on was iron grating so that you could see straight down hundreds of feet to where the waves crashed against the rocks. I threw a rock over the edge for fun.

At some point I left the patio and found myself in a small, quaint village. It had dirt and rock roads running through it, and the land was broken and uneven. Most of the buildings were log cabins, but it seemed an aesthetic choice as opposed to one of necessity. It was obviously a place for tourism as there were many people roaming around looking in shop windows and taking pictures.

I noticed a man in hunting boots and a thick coat standing off to the side of one of the roads, looking up to where the ground rose up to a line of craggy rocks that broke the horizon.

“Glacier melt is happenin’ soon,” he said to me, and took a swig from the glass of beer he held. He had a rough, unkempt beard, grey with age. His beanie was orange and dirty. “It’ll wash through, maybe pick up a few of these tourists and toss ’em into the sea.”

I remember laughing, and I turned to go explore.

“You stay right here and you’ll be safe,” he warned. “Not long now.” He looked off to the rocks and pointed. “It’ll come right over the edge there. Happens every day.”

I ignored him and wandered off. I bought a beer from a cabin that had a half-door that they were selling food out of. They let me walk around with the glass, so I drank and wandered.

The architecture reminded me of something rural Eastern European, or perhaps specifically German. Lots of woodwork like you’d see on cuckoo clocks, but on the outside of the cabins.

Suddenly, the tourists seemed to panic a bit and there was the sudden sound of rushing water. A flash flood of dirty water ripped directly down one of the roads nearby and I could see tourists caught in it. Other people were watching but no one seemed to mind. I was not far away from where I had started at and I saw the man that had spoken to me earlier, still standing in the same spot from before. It looked like he’d be right in the path of the water if it went his way.

While the rest of the tourists ran around in a panic, most of the shopowners and people that lived there stood in their doorways, patiently waiting and smiling as people were seemingly swept away to doom. I casually walked over to the place where the man had told me to stand, sipping my beer as I walked.

“That’s just the tease,” he said. “A little squirt to show you the business is about to happen.” He winked at me.

The sound of rushing water rose to a level so loud that you couldn’t hear much else. Water broke over the edge of the rock in a roaring flood and cascaded down into the little village, sticking mostly to the roads. Where the man and I stood, we were actually standing in the middle of side street of dirt. It seemed like it would hit us directly. I braced myself, and sure enough as the wall of water rushed towards us, it split right before and went to either side of us.

The man and I sipped our beer casually. We watched tourists get carried away by the waters and then slip over the edge of a cliff, which appeared to dump them into the bay that I had been over at the restaurant earlier.

The man invited me to a cabin where a lot of the locals were gathering. It was a happy place, comfortable and simple. Everyone was drinking beer and I felt good as the dream faded and I woke up.