I had a tornado dream a couple of nights ago! Hooray! I so heart my tornado dreams. This one was unusual in that very early on I realized it was a dream. You’ll see why:
My brother & I were looking out the back of the house we grew up in (in Kent). The sky was clouded with a pretty uniform light gray, but in the center of the sky a big swirl was starting to form. We were very excited about this, because tornadoes come from swirly clouds.
But there was something almost immediately odd about the swirl in the clouds. It was too regular. Too… fractal. Like this:
I was immediately suspicious, and told my brother, “I think this might be a dream.” But almost immediately an actual funnel cloud formed and dove for the ground. It wasn’t so much a funnel cloud, though, as it was a wiggly vertical tube cloud that descended from the spiral.
We were very pleased by this development; it seemed realistic enough. We eagerly watched as the bottom of the tube approached the ground.
But then *BOINK* the instant the tornado touched down it was, as if by magic, replaced with a gigantic orange tarp. Several hundred feet tall, awkwardly rolled up and bound by many ropes.
“Yeah,” I said to my brother, “this is a dream all right.”
My dream people valiantly tried to keep the dream going after that, which included us storm-chasing in a car a very tiny tornado (about 12″ wide) that was headed for Seattle, while simultaneously being “chased” (it was more just lazily following us) by an identical tornado. When we got to Seattle I think my dream people didn’t feel like accurately rendering the city, because it didn’t look at all like the real Seattle.
But what were they thinking? A tornado transforms into an enormous orange tarp? What the heck kind of dream is that?
Soon after that I switched to another dream entirely that was a post-apocalyptic story about an afterlife in which everybody got indestructible bodies that were exact copies of their real ones, but then had to live among the ruins on Earth. Also, there was an angel who was in charge of all of this who was kind of awkward and didn’t know how to comfort all of the horribly upset, recently-deceased people.
