I'm a substitute teacher at an old house in a small town, reminiscent of a house at the east end of my street, on the left.  The sky and air are a hazy grey. I'm not suppose to be here, I feel. People eye me warily as I enter the house, and ascend the stairs spiraling to the right. A police officer is asking me questions about where this other teacher is, as a class of grade school children wait sitting down on the carpet for him. 

Apparently, I know his girlfriend - the person who directed me here. Other adults mill around a room that overlooks the entranceway downstair. Their glass 2nd floor windowed kitchen overlooks the street below, with a sloping nearby roof presenting nearby. 

Two large vehicles pull up to this house, and various tough but skinny looking men step out. One in particular takes point, and shouts something about a teacher to the house, then waits. 

I approach the group outside, and maintain a friendly, clueless persona toward this group. They all appear russian, but the skinniness I noticed earlier is actually a fetal alcohol syndrome-like look to their heads and bodies. The shaved head leader addresses me, looking for this missing teacher. I tell them I'm just filling in for him because he's missing. I don't mention the police, just the kids and adults inside. He asks what else in inside - I tell him "Just a bunch of textbooks". I notice how dirty and unclean his earlobes are. Many of these people look like they haven't bathed in a long time. I maintain a relaxed posture, and try to be friendly-helpful -- pretending like everything is ok, and gesture that I needed to get back to class. The man dismisses me and the group head back to their vehicles. 

In the hazy distance, I see figures moving slowly in the distance. Anxious, I quickly return to the house, and kitchen over looking the yard. In a nearby room on the north side of the house, a man and a woman anxiously await news of what the men want. "They look like Russian mob, and were asking about that missing teacher - and the house contents". I warn them to reinforce the sliding windows with wood door jams.

In the kitchen, a ragged looking woman in her 50s from the street below has scaled a nearby house and is now climbing up the slanted roof toward the kitchen. The house is empty, and I am nowhere. 

I'm standing in an old house with weathered floorboards. Much of feels exposed to the elements, but feels dry and eroded. Peeling wallpaper, dusty, torn furniture. The hallway has walled off glass sections that capture the house as it was - new, with fresh wallpaper and new cabinets. It feels like an exhibit, juxtaposing what was with what is. 

Down a hallway from a locked door, toward the front of the house is a frosted bay window. Yellow light filters in through the grime, blocking a view of the world beyond the house. It feels like I'm on the 2nd story of a home, given the dim horizon in the distance viewable through cracks in the glass. I turn left and walk down a connected hallway. To my immediate right is a washroom that is slanted toward the back of the house. The room is old, with the slanted floor implying the house foundations are sinking, or rotten. I use the sink and move on. From the hallway opens into a living room with a kitchen along one wall. My younger brother walks along beside me, having always been there quietly. We search the room, looking for some clue as to where we are. Along the left wall are a kitchen sink, an old fridge, and a small 4-panel window at the end of the hall/side of the kitchen-living room. An old sofa sits in the middle of the room, with an old chair near the window. Outside the window, it looks out onto a yard that slopes up to meet the window. 

Through the window, we see a man chase a boy out of the back of his house, down a set of porch steps and out on to his back yard. There's a deranged looking elderly woman near the door who emerges as well. The old man chases the boy down mid-yard and viciously beats him to death. I instruct my brother to hide, and I crawl under the sofa, behind the flaps of the furniture's skirt. Surrounded by dust and the smell of aged floorboards, I hear the noise of violence outside, then silence. 

The old man enters the house through our window and discover us. We run, but are caught. I try to struggle, but the man and woman are insubstantial, like ghosts.

 * * *

Everything resets, and I'm back standing next to the glassed off pristine area as I was before. However, the house is filled with people. I search for an exit at the front of the house, and then for a weapon and find neither. I confront the man as he enters the room this time, but my efforts pass through him ineffectively.

Everything rests. Time and time again. I lose track of the number of times I try to escape this loop. In desperation, I run straight out of the side of the house, through the window the moment I reset. I run up the deck past the crazy woman, past the murderous man and the running, filthy child. Into their house I run, and to their locked front door. I open it, and a younger woman -  perhaps the boy's mother - runs in with a hammer and strikes both of the older, crazed people. As she approaches the boy, they all disappear. 

I'm left in an empty house. I follow the hallway down the left side into a makeshift prison area that once housed the boy. It appears that he had a bare carpeted room, a washroom, and a barred 'lookout' tower with a ladder all within the left side of this old person's house. I try to exit the front door, but it's locked. I can see the aged ruins of suburbs outside, but I'm like the ghosts I see trapped inside. The loop broken, I wander. Everyone's gone. 

I try walking around the side of the old man's house but I'm hit with vertigo. Time slows down, pushing me back toward the backyard. I feel that I'm not allowed to go this way, but I push through. Once I make it to the street, the sensation clears. I walk past the decaying mansion and suburban home, looking for meaning before I wake. 

Passing through a convince store, and out the other side into the night air.

I'm walking, or trying to along the side-walk with a co-worker I had years ago. She and I are joking around, intentionally bumping into each other, flirting. It's a nice re-channelling of memories I had, but they're gone. The night air remains.

I'm with two current friends outside - a guy and a girl. We're all thirsty, and start trying to find some house that will give us water. No ones around - the houses sit empty and dark.
We go though various houses, and I stop to look at book cases and books that have never existed. As I walk though the empty aparments and houses, I see the detritus of other peoples lives. There's a set of cups floating in a bucket, but no drinkable water.

The guy hears TV noise in a far room, and I'm nervous. He enters, and quickly re-emerges to explain that we need to leave. We descend the ladder leading to this loft area, and rush toward the front door. We're not suppose to be here.

An older Korean woman is walking up the front lawn, emotionless. She grabs me  as I leave (her) house, and won't let go. I struggle to break free, and realize if I do, I can continue to dream. She squeezes me, and I awake.

There's a threatening presence outside, across the street, and I'm in the parlour room of an old home. There's a shallow grave dug though the floorboards, straight down with a woman laying in it. 

She was alive recently, but became infected or posessed by something. There's a crowd of people in the room, mostly scared farmers or rural middle-aged looking people.

To prevent the body from getting up, someone fires a nailgun though the woman's head. However, it starts verbalizing.

Someone calmly explains it's rediscovering basic vocal structures found in all vertebrates. I realize there's something in this woman that's colonizing her body. It moves on to making ape-like noises, but no real words yet. The limbs are twitching.

The presence outside wants this thing destroyed, but the people inside are fearfully protecting it. I realize the man who spoke with me earlier wasn't himself - he was some kind of colonized body puppeting a person. He has an unfocused look in his eyes.

The woman rises, nail still though her head and starts frosting the glass windows. If the presence outside can't see in, I'm told, it will delay it's attack.

The parlour room is attached to my grandparent's house. I walk past the side door, and trigger something's attack. Sheer terror as the house shakes with wind, screams, and rapid gunfire. I hide beside the doorway, and then crawl toward my old room, seeking a place to hide.

It's daytime, and people from earlier in the dream are gone. Someone whose my grandmother, but not my grandmother is cooking breakfast in the kitchen. I'm sitting in the carpeted hallway, trying to attach a hexagonal lid to a jar of chocolate peanut butter. 

There's still a grave dug through the living room floor though.

Dancing a waltz with ex-girlfriend. She doesn't look very well.

 At first, I'm confused: and I haven't seen her in many years, and there's no music playing. I have one arm around her upper shoulder, and cupping the back of her neck, under her red hair. This is how I realize she's actually dead - the scalp feels like it's separating from the back of her skull. 

I'm filled with terror, and fear that if I stop dancing with the resurrected corpse, she'll kill me. 

 Our soundless waltz continues as dusty floorboards of the house creak.

I'm standing outside a red brick building on a cloudy day, photographing the sky. Something isn't right.

I alternate between using my camera and my phone, because I can't make sense of what I'm seeing in the photographs: The clouds seem to drift from the horizon, then curl back at a higher altitude like a wave. There are things on the underside of the clouds. Squares, of some kind.

I enlarge the images on my phone, and see that they're tents - canvas squares anchored down. Others are beds, upside down, and high above me - anchored to the clouds.

A rising panic swells inside me. I can't make sense of this. I rush inside to a computer, and open up a memory card on screen. Something is wrong - something or someone doesn't want these images viewed or spread: the icons and filenames of each photograph begin of dissolve into multicolored static. I try to disconnect the drive from the computer, but the drive has smoke pouring out of it already.

Something is living in the clouds, and doesn't want to be found.

It’s night, and I am outside. Surrounding me are the ruins of old stone buildings with their skeletal timbers jutting upward toward a dark sky. The landscape feels like the property of my old house, before it was renovated. There’s a chill in the air, despite the torchlight that illuminates a few points in the distance.

There’s a group of frightened people waiting to the left of a cellar doorway. I step over the shambles of a wooden farm fence, and find that they’re arming themselves with makeshift weapons. Pipes with large bolts, kitchen blades, Molotov cocktails, and other less intimidating things. 

A man rushes over, and presses a grenade into my hand. “They’re coming!” The crazed look in his eyes frightens me more than his dire prediction. “He shouts to no one in particular, “Get ready!”. People gather on the lawn, facing this cellar door. The doors are missing, revealing concrete stairs that descend down into a dark hallway beneath the ruins of a large house. I recognize this as the ruins of my old home.

Undead emerge from the cellar steps into the torchlight. I’ve released the grenade, and tossed it down the stairwell. The explosion sends shards of concrete everywhere, and as I fall down I lose my glasses. Scrambling to retrieve them, the world devolves into blurs of movement, and torchlight.

People sound like they’re panicking, and attempting to run while other attack the undead. I see struggling forms falling to the ground, and back away while still laying on the ground.  In the darkness, I retreat away from the cellar door, toward the road. Still without my glasses, I find a heavy steel pipe weapon nearby. Up the stairs and toward me move a woman and child, both dead. A man takes down the woman, and with startling speed, the child bares its small teeth as it rushes toward me.

*  *  *

The rest is a blur. By the time I can hear anything beyond a high pitch whistle in my ears, I realize that I am covered in blood, and slumped on my knees next to an oak tree. I feel like I'm in shock, and have a deep sense of vertigo. Gradually, I regain my composure. 

To the right of the house is another ruin, but one that has a door and first floor but no roof. Side stepping the corpses the litter the ground, I walk over to the house and sort through the garbage can next to the doorway. I hope to find something useful. Inside, I find a box-cutter, an empty DVD case, and a bubble envelope. An old man stops me as I back away from the can, and explains that he “put them there for a reason”, then returns the objects to the garbage. 

I walk through the door, and up a short flight of stairs. I am standing in a kitchen that has a window facing the road. I turn on the kitchen faucet, but realize it’s too short; a stubby bathroom design. The water doesn't reach the sink. Instead, it pools all over the dusty counter top. 

My father is standing nearby, reading pages from a binder. It looks like he’s seen battle, and his pants and shirt are tons and frayed at the knees and elbows. “I need to get out of here”, I tell him. He explains that he’s going ahead to Quebec to locate a safe zone for the family to move to, but he needs me to stay here to watch out for the family while he’s gone.

I can’t do this though. It’s his responsibility to look after the family, not mine. The dream reasoning blends with reality as I realize that I am moving overseas for work, and I can’t stay behind. The sounds of the undead echo off in the distance as my father remarks “Do what you need to do.” He turns back to studying his binder of papers.

I don't want to abandon my parents to the threats outside, but I know that my presence here can't stop what's coming. I walk outside into the night, but there’s no longer any torches lit. Looking out over the ruins of the house, and the featureless sky above, I feel a deep sense of dread.