Devastation ~ 5/30/2019

I dreamed I was living in Houston, in an apartment in the West University area. I needed an outfit for a special occasion of some sort. Maybe a wedding. I drove to the mall. The sky was gray and heavy, and rain was spattering across my windshield.

I got to the mall and drove around looking for a parking place. There was a gate into an almost empty area surrounded by a chain link fence. I pulled into there and parked. As I walked toward the mall, I passed dozens of people running back the other way. One of them shouted out that we'd all better get our cars out while we could. They'd be shutting down the employee lot soon.

I guessed I must have parked wrong, and I was torn between running into the nearest shop real quick and getting what I needed and hurrying back, and going back to move my car first. In the end I went and moved my car into a parking garage. By the time I got back to the doors of the store, I could see there was no one inside, and the doors were locked. Yellow light glistened over empty jewelry display cases, and bare clothing racks. I hurried around the building to get to another store, but I could see people all coming out of that one, and a security guard waiting to lock up behind them.

As I trudged back to the parking garage, I could see the sky to the north boiling with black clouds. Obviously a horrible storm was coming, and I supposed the mall had shut down to keep people from lingering away from home. I hurried to get to my car, because I could see another guard gating off the parking garage. I wondered for a minute if my car wouldn't be safer there, but then, I wanted to get home, and I couldn't do that without my car.  So I got in and drove to the gate, and the guard let me out, but he told me to hurry.

I was only a half mile away from home when I could feel the car slow and begin to shudder from side to side with the wind. I looked into the rear view window and saw a funnel cloud touch down a mile or to behind me. I'd always heard that inside your car is the worst place to be in a tornado situation, so I pulled into a parking lot and tried to figure out what to do.

There was a small cinder block building in the center of the lot, and I hurried to it, hoping the door wasn't locked. As I ran, I could feel the wind tugging at me from behind, slowing me down as I zigzagged across the pavement.  Small whirlwinds were spinning up out of the puddles and falling rain all around me. It seemed to take forever to cross the lot, and I thought I would never get there, but would be sucked up into the clouds.

I finally reached the door, and I tugged and tugged, but it was bolted, and I burst into tears. Suddenly the knob twisted in my hands and I lurched inside as someone yanked the door open and pulled me through. The door slammed behind me, and I heard the bolt shoot as I wiped the rain and tears out of my eyes. There was only one person, a man about my age, who had thankfully found the door open and was sheltering there as well. He showed me his weather app, and I could see the brilliant red radar blob headed our way, with tornado symbols scattered across.

We inspected the windows, but they were all reinforced glass, so this was as safe as we were going to be. There was a pounding on the door, and we rushed to let in a school teacher and her class of kids who had been on a field trip. As we struggled to shut the door, I looked up and almost froze in horror.

A monstrous funnel cloud had formed not far away. It looked hundreds of yards wide, and was a deep, roiling gray wedge from heaven to earth. We slammed and bolted the door. I was so thankful it was heavy and metal, with bulky hinges and a solid lock. The man checked his app, and we could see that it was only half a mile from us, and headed almost right for us. We could hear it as a muffled roar, swelling louder and louder until we couldn't hear ourselves shout, much less speak. All we could do was pray.

So I prayed. I prayed desperately, crouching close to the walls, holding sobbing children. We all prayed. We all shook. We all wept and moaned in our fright. We watched through the rattling windows as the enormous tornado pass no more than two blocks to the east, headed due south down Kirby drive. I tried to picture who of my friends might be in its path. I begged the fates that they were out of the way, or had found some safe spot. The spinning pillar of darkness danced to the west a bit, and I knew it could be headed for my apartment complex, but I just hoped it wouldn't decide to come back north.

It didn't. The storm swept south. The afternoon sun began to glimmer palely through the clouds, then shine out, sparkling like diamonds across the wet streets and bushes. I looked out over the lot. My car was gone. But we were safe. The teacher and I exchanged names so we could connect on Facebook. Her name was Katharine Kate. The school bus was still there, on the west side of the lot, so she got all of the kids onto it and they headed off. The man offered to drive me home.

I got back to my apartment complex and people were all finding their way through debris to their doors, but everything looked mostly intact. It turned out that only the back corner of my building had been damaged, but it was my unit that had the gaping hole where the corner of what had been my half-bath had been knocked away. The management was already inspecting the damage, and all I'd need to do would be to keep that door shut until repairs were made. They installed a lock.

I went to a nearby school that was serving food, and went through the cafeteria line. There were several types of sausages and a huge variety of doughnuts being served, so that was nice. I got a bratwurst, a cinnamon twist, and a chocolate glazed, then remembered I should mark myself safe on Facebook, so people would know I was all right. But it was hard to get things to load, because obviously the bandwidth on all the networks was being strained. The guy behind me in line began to make fun of me, but I finally got things set.

After I finished eating, I went to look for my car. I finally found it beneath the I-59 overpass at Buffalo Speedway. It was smashed flat as a pancake, somehow. The only way I could be sure it was mine was that next to it was a black leather gig bag, also smashed flat, with the silver glint of my mangled trumpet winking out from the splits in the leather. Just beyond that were the splintered ruins of my father's guitar, which I'd had in the back to take to the event I'd gone shopping for. I began to cry, and then I woke up.

Tree BnB ~5/29/2019

I dreamed I was visiting Houston, but I couldn’t stay with friends and I couldn’t find an opening anywhere for the whole of my stay. So I booked into an Air BnB for the first night, a hotel for two more nights, then another Air BnB listing. My flight arrived fine, and I got to my first lodging. For an Air BnB, it had very little character. It was a small, square, plain white room. The walls were white, the bed linens were white, there was no art on the walls to relieve the whiteness. I needed a shower, and the bathroom was a tiny cubby off the side of the room, but the water pressure was good and the water was hot. The white bed was piled high with white pillows. Everything was comfortable, even with the noise of the city outside of small, high windows. So I slept well.

I spent the next day working in the Galleria area. I was stressed and tired and I didn’t do anything fun. I worked late and didn’t get back to the hotel until late. The next day I got to do some sight seeing. I found this amazing shrine in the neighborhood near Rice. Hundreds of designs and motifs and figures were carved in golden wood against a deep mahogany back drop. The back wall was carved into a broad, scalloped curve to look like the inside of an enormous tree.

The images were all old, wild, and pagan. There were trees and vines and Green Men. There were nymphs of the woods and water and mountains. There were stags with spreading antlers, fairies wearing mushroom caps and dancing in rings. It was all beautiful, and gleamingly polished, but a little scary, all the same. It had a haunted forest feel, even though we were in the middle of Houston.

I spent my last night at the hotel and left early to check into the Air BnB room I’d be staying in the rest of my visit. I had lock codes to the outside gates and doors and a key box already, in my email, so I just showed up and let myself in.

There was a swimming pool that guests could use, so I decided to change into my swimsuit and have a swim. Just then, two small boys with white-blond hair came running in, laughing and shouting. They jumped up onto the patchwork quilted bed and down on the other side, dashing into an alcove hung with laundry and little flags and colorful streamers. They dashed through and around all this, playing tag or something. They barely noticed me.

I asked them if they lived here, and they stopped long enough to tell me they were Rusty and Devon, and they did live here, and their mom sent them up to find the cat. It occurred to me that I might be too early for check in, and what if previous guests hadn’t left yet??? But the woman of the house came in then and said it was fine. The boys ran out and I could hear them clomping down the stairs.

I asked if I could go swim, and if maybe the kiddos would like to join me, and she said that would be nice. She called down to the boys to put on their swimsuits, and she began to clear up the things hanging in the alcove. She was taking down laundry and winding up streamers as we talked. She told me they had another person staying up on the seventh floor, in the White Room, and more expected later in the week who would be up on the 43rd floor. Her husband would be busy all weekend working in the yard, so she hoped things would be quiet enough.

She had taken down enough of the hangings to reveal a platter of smoke-cured pork loin airing out on a little table, and behind another set of streamers I could see sausages hanging. She said the alcove was a smoking room, and she was glad they’d gotten it aired out in time for my stay. I assured her I didn’t smell smoke at all. She and her husband made hand-crafted, artisanal smoked meats, and I was welcome to try a slice. It would be $2, and I could start a tab. So she sliced off some of the pork loin for me, and I wandered out of my room chewing on it and exploring the house.

I walked down a tower staircase that spiraled against curved walls. The distance between the walls widened slightly as I got nearer and nearer the ground floor. To my left was a doorway leading to the family part of the house. I could see timber beams and a vaulted ceiling, and huge sloping windows looking out onto a green forest. I turned and looked up the stairway and saw it winding up and up within the bole of a tree.

I went outside and saw what looked like an empty but ordinary office building and parking garage behind the tree. There was an elevator going up the side of the garage, and a skyway from the top level to a room built onto the side of the tree. Suddenly I recognized it. I had taken that elevator and skyway to the white room the night I had arrived, but I hadn’t see the tree at all.

I went back into the entrance hall, that was within the huge hollow tree trunk, and I came face to face with the golden wood shrine. It wasn’t just carved to look like it was inside a tree. It was actually carved out of the inside of an absolutely gigantic tree. The whole house had been carved out of the tree, or built from wood removed to hollow the trunk. The tree must have been 30 feet wide at the base and hundreds of feet tall. And since trees grow outward, it was still completely alive, growing slowly all around me. The shrine was added to every year. The walls were stained to look like paneling, alternating cherry red and pale beech and old oak. Everything outside was green and growing. The swimming pool was cupped in a hollow among the tangle of enormous roots.

The sounds of the city had silenced, smothered in the undergrowth of forest that had sprung up. The parking garage and offices were growing over with vines and fern and moss. There were wires high overhead for the people higher up to reach their rooms, but as I strained to see how that worked, they were lost in the canopy of jade and emerald leaves that spread between me and the sky. There were no sounds except the high, soft piping of the birds and the lazy hum of bees. Dragon flies flashed like jewels as they started in and out of sunbeams. I went back in to look for my swimsuit, and then I woke up.