Sorry, no zombies

I’m in my grandparent’s house. They live on a farm in upstate New York. It’s very green acres. It is the middle of the night and I’m standing in the kitchen and hear the door to the outside open behind me. I turn around and my friend Tommy (whom I haven’t seen for years) comes bounding in with a whole group of friends I no longer keep in touch with. Tommy let’s me know that they all followed me as I drove up, as per the plan, we are to have a party. In the dream I remember specifically reflecting on and recalling making no such plans to party at my grandparents home of all places. This also strikes me as odd (whilst still in the dream) because Tommy is exuberant and energetic. He never behaves this way, he smoked his brain to a semi-catatonic mush several years ago. At this moment from the back of the house there erupts the tremendous thunder of engine noise, like a muscle car show. I race through the house to the field in back. Along the way my grandmother tells be she’s going to bed and she’ll see me in the morning. When I reach the sun porch with its floor to ceiling windows and gaze through them I see a trail of cars, not a part of the party of friends these people driving are strangers, dragging miscellaneous chunks of cars behind them. The car parts are weathered and rusted as if they were towed from a junkyard.

I return through the house toward the kitchen but make it half way before Tommy stops me and assures me he can get rid of these people. He disappears from sight, at the same time there is a huge boom from the field and this next part is difficult to describe so hang in there, I’ll do my best.

A dream certainty comes to me. I become aware that my father is dead, he has gone out to the back, I’m not sure what for or how but at this point in the dream I am sure he is dead. He had not appeared in this dream yet at all but just the same I become secure in the knowledge in the way only dreams can assert things for you. It’s not a fear I experience in the dream but a certainty of knowledge.

I race through the house once more, running back toward the sun porch. This time when I look through the windows I see a line of cars. It’s still the middle of the night so I don’t see them so much as a nearly endless trail of headlights. Not unlike the end of the movie field of dreams, a tremendous line of headlights zig-zaging it’s way across the countryside into infinity. Then I wake up.

Just for context: This dream occurred on the night before the one-year anniversary of my grandfather’s death, October 24th. I haven’t been to that house since a year ago when I buried him. He never had a muscle car and my father is alive and well.