I quite literally just woke up from the following dream, so it’s still fresh in my mind.
I, my parents, and my sister were out visiting neighbours when a wildfire started blazing to the east of us; it was so intense, it sent a veritable pillar of flame into the sky, a thick blanket of smoke unfurling from it to cover the sky. Since the fire was very close – several hundred metres away at most – and due to its ferocity, it was believed it would grow beyond control before fire fighters could arrive to contain it and easily sweep over our homes.
Fearful for the fate of my pets and my belongings, against the warnings of all others, I started running home as fast as I could to try to save my pets and collect what belongings I could in the short amount of time I had before the flames swept over things. Something happened to me then, though – an injury or some such – 'cause for some reason I was knocked out cold. When I came to, it was weeks later. I learned second-hand from my family that our home had been one of the ones caught in the fire; all of our possessions had presumably been destroyed, and one of our dogs had died (I don’t know what become of our plethora of cats).
Jump forward a decade or two, and I found myself wandering the grounds of a nearby university, where I crossed paths with a female student (who resembled this actress). I asked her if she knew about the wildfire which claimed my neighbourhood all those years ago; she said she did. I asked her if she’d like to come with me to visit the old neighbourhood; she said she did. Together, we walked to my old neighbourhood. The landscape had changed considerably since the 2010s. Where there had once been a small church there was now an Arby’s restaurant (which had transitioned from a chain of sandwich restaurants into a Dairy Queen knockoff in the intervening years).
Coming to where my house had once stood, we found no trace of it. Instead there were several affluent, white-painted homes and small shacks present. Many of the buildings were smouldering, including one fuzzy Chow Chow who lay in one of the front yards (The Chow Chow was alive and unharmed in spite of this.). The girl pondered on how the area could still be smouldering after all these years, but it was readily apparent that this was the result of a recent fire, not remnants of that long bygone wildfire.
