I rarely dream, but this dream, felt like a memory and although not lucid, felt real. I'm hesitant to call it a nightmare but it's somehow more unnerving than watching your friends get eaten alive from a closet, being stalked in your own home or running from something.
Spoiler
In this dream, I return to the home I've known most of my life and my entire childhood, a large house on the Randalstown Church Road. Elevated so high above the road at an angle that it appeared level from the front but had three enormous steps at the back, from one corner of the back to the other, leading down to a large stone courtyard, if you sat down on the top step you might take in the view.
From the right hand corner of the back of the house to the left, the top step supported an old wooden door, with its frame connected to both the house itself and a shed with grey brick foundation, mostly in fact with a tin roof, and large sliding door. The large shed on its left wall connected to a picket fence a quarter or so the height of the shed, easily passable by a young adult stepping over it.
The fence curved as it formed a corner, then connected to a stone wall that returned to the height of the shed, or just roughly the height of it, perhaps slightly above or below, I don't remember. The wall itself at a certain point turned to a 90 degree angle, and then again identically, with the wall ending in a gate. All the aforementioned features formed the perimeter of the back of the house.
It was a farmhouse a long time ago, so it faced a country main road not far from the town itself but far enough that it felt a lifetime away from any civilisation. It was certainly far enough from everyone else's abode. At the front door, and front lawn a white picket fence sat as the perimeter of the entire front of the house apart from one feature, it ended up overgrown by a hedge generally concealing the elevation. The one feature that broke the hedge's perimeter was, say if you admired the front lawn from just outside the front door, on your right was a separation in the hedge itself, leading down just behind the gate mentioned previously and also behind the only entrance to the place, a cattle grid connecting the road and the backyard.
The front of the house only contained one noteworthy feature, where a tree, of the variation I don't remember reached up into the sky, nearer to the cattle grid than the house itself, but clearly visible through the upper left window, my old room.
Now, the restless dream begins:
I and my sibling, my brother returned to the house for whatever reason near enough to dusk that the sky began to turn blood red, we stood outside the house on the road.
Empty, quiet and alone, the threshold is crossed and suddenly we notice wild cats, wild cats not so wild in the feral sense, but in the free sense- nothing more than kittens running around.
We awkwardly cross the cattle grid, I'm much older now. I see the kittens, I recognize them from my childhood. Playing, as never before. As never. A dog runs at me from a new place, a newer more modern and more comfortable looking shed, built in front of the old fence. Cows don't inhabit the field beyond it anymore. The dog licks my face, he is a Yorkshire Terrier but larger, perhaps part Jack Russell. We enter the comfort of the new shed, my brother says that we have to wait here, I smile and play with the dog, as he deserves and always deserved. I remember that I don't remember enough, I remember him and his brother. I ask why we can't leave with him, my brother says he can not leave. Until Vivid cerise, if we left now with or without him the place is no longer worldly, and Luna spoke before the clouds unfurled "It would not be good." So I stay and weep, until I fall asleep. Morning comes and the dogs and cats, gone, I hope the dog is happy now.
