A recent dream:

I am in the garage of my grandparents’ house, which for some reason looks out over my aunt’s back lawn. I am getting ready to go home after a long day of eating.

The weather has been fine, maybe a bit warm, so I am glad to see a cloud form in the sky, right in front of the sun. That should cool things off just enough to make the day perfect.

Other clouds congeal in the skies. One particular cloud looks especially dark and is closing in from the south pretty darn fast. I think I’d better get home before it starts raining, and no sooner does that thought cross my mind than it begins to drizzle. I get in my car and drive home.

The cloud I saw earlier now hovers over downtown, but the rain never gets any heavier. Traffic comes to a dead stop south of the bridge, so I put the car in park and turn to a talk channel in hopes of getting a weather and traffic report.

More dark clouds slither in from all directions. They bounce off each other and roll over each other and spin around each other. The clouds occasionally glow, and the brief gaps between them betray a terrific lightning storm high above. The wind whips up, and this storm is darker and brighter and louder and far more forceful than anything I’d ever seen before.

I can see the high-rises downtown wobble and rattle. Debris falls from the tops of some of the older ones. Signage comes detached, and ten-foot letters tumble down or dangle by mere serifs. The wind shatters the windows on the highest floors of the highest towers, and it drags some poor souls right out, and they hang on for dear life. I can see people on the inside hesitate to approach the windows to save the hangers-on, but the wind then pushes some of them back in. The wind breaks more windows, and pulls more people out, and the cycle repeats.

The interstate is still a bumper-to-bumper parking lot, but I’m not sure I want it to start moving again.

…

There was more to this dream, but I can’t make out most of what’s on my voice recorder. Here’s what I remember:

1. Something was wrong with the Earth’s core. A blue holographic world map in some sort of situation room showed these massive, burning rifts across continents and along ocean floors. How that affected the skies in part one of the dream is beyond me– or maybe it was a separate dream and had nothing to do with the storm.

2. Some frauds had convinced Congress that the problem was that the core was rusting, so billions of federal dollars went to them instead of my lab.

3. The frauds and the guys from my lab were having a cookout.

And that’s it. I don’t remember if the frauds and my guys had teamed up to fix the Earth’s core, or if they realized that we were all doomed so we might as well enjoy some burgers and beers before the world ended, or what. I need to work on dream retention.

…

Rusting. Jesus.