The following is quite possibly the strangest dream I’ve ever had. If not, it’s certainly the strangest dream I’ve had within living memory.
My mother’s side of the family was throwing a family reunion at my Uncle Dave and Aunt Sharon’s place, so my mother and father and me went there to take part in the proceedings (my sister was strangely absent). There, we found ourselves packed in amongst dozens upon dozens of relatives, many of whom we had met only briefly once before or not at all.
Fast forward to dinnertime, where Aunt Sharon served me a platter of buffalo wings and coffee cake as an appetizer before the main course, which was either steak or turkey (the diner got to decide which they wanted). There was going to be a large gap of time between the appetizer and the main course, so after eating my wings and nibbling on my cake, I spent the interim chatting with one of my cousins, Andrea.
Andrea was a pretty girl, about fifteen years old though she looked like she was at least five years older, and rather friendly. She told me that we had met once before years ago, in the last family reunion, when we were both little kids, where we had participated in a game where we pretended to be man and wife (Yeah, in spite of the fact that she was fifteen and I was still twenty-nine in the dream, making it impossible for us to have both been little kids at the same time, we somehow had still been.). In spite of playing the marriage game, though, we had come away disliking each other in real life. At first I couldn’t remember any of this ever happening, which frustrated her deeply, but gradually I came to recall this chain of events.
To get away from all the hustle and bustle going around us, Andrea and I had stepped into an alcove between two walls or shelves or something so we could talk alone and in peace. One of our relatives found us there, and he had immediately jumped to the conclusion that I had brought her there so I could seduce her without being caught, which wasn’t what I had been doing at all. This relative spread this unfounded claim to everyone else, and soon most everyone was regarding me as a statutory rapist, threatening to call the police. Even though Andrea backed me up, angrily shouting to everyone that nothing sexual had gone on between us, no one listened; even her mother, Aunt Middleton, treated me like a bug to squash. (My parents had mysteriously disappeared during all of this.)
Pretty soon tempers escalated, and those who had been crying for my arrest began howling for my blood; they literally wanted me dead. One of the relatives there – dressed in a suit of steampunk armour – soon began stalking me. He wore mechanical gauntlets on his wrists which launched long metal bolts, bolts launched at great enough velocity to kill me. I took one of these bolts, and through trickery, I managed to kill Mr. Steampunk with it.
Shit then really got real. In fear of my life, I began using a machete and a garden claw as weapons to defend myself, hacking and slashing through droves of murderous relatives to stay alive. In the midst of all this, someone had ordered a pizza. When the pizza man entered the building, in the heat of battle I failed to keep myself from burying my machete blade in his carotid artery. Eyes widening in horror, I pulled the blade out of his neck and pressed my hand down on the gushing wound. One of my uncles, a doctor, took my place stanching the pizza man’s blood flow while I told someone to call for an ambulance; someone mentioned that they had already notified the authorities, that paramedics and policemen were already on their way. The dream kind of trailed off there.
I think the strangest aspect of this dream is that aside from my own mother and father, none of the people in this dream are real-life relatives of mine. “Uncle” Dave and “Aunt” Sharon are old friends of my parents who are now divorced; “Aunt” Middleton was a counselor/aide who worked at my high school; the doctor uncle I mentioned looked exactly like Kevin’s Uncle Frank from the first two Home Alone movies; and my cousin Andrea was actually Andrea Nemeth, a retired Canadian actress.