In Life What Dreams May Come

There may be more of my Nordic ancestry viking around in my subconscious than I realize.. (Yes, "viking around" is a verb now. It's like loitering around, only somewhat more dangerous to bystanders)

Here's a snippet from a long and complicated dream last night:

In a fairly realistic amalgamation of my grandparents' and an older version of my parents' current houses, we hear a horrible growling and snarling continuously coming from under the floor. I walk around the house praying for a while (since we don't know what it is). There wasn't much fear, just a slight sense of dread and watchfulness.

I think a subplot came in at this point of which I don't remember the details, and during which the sound under the floor fades away, but there is a gathering storm outside as night falls. We sit outside on the porch to keep watch during the night for some reason, having lit a number of candles against the darkness so that the children who were there wouldn't be as afraid. I recall there was snow on the ground (the moon or starlight there was made the darkness seem very dark blue, like it does on snow) and some of the candles were on the porch, some were clumped together in the snow.

The next thing I can remember, it's light again, a grey day. There is no thunder or lightning, but the wind is blowing very hard, thrashing all the trees in the yard. The winds increase even more, and the giant old tree in our front yard begins to shudder. With the strongest gust of wind yet, the trunk moved more than I've ever seen it do before, then after being blown hard to one side, to our shock with a loud cracking sound it actually falls over. As it does so, its vast root system is unearthed all through our front yard, and along with them with a disastrous sound a giant dragon-ish snout emerges from the disturbed ground, long and full of razor-sharp teeth. It was clearly Nidhogg, who had been gnawing on the roots of our tree. (In the dream I realized the roots went under our house and the dragon's growling is what we'd been hearing earlier in the dream)

Someone had a .22 rifle and started plinking away at the dragon (Of course... it's a Dixie Ragnarok), but it wasn't having much effect so I went searching for something of higher caliber. It seems that defeating it wasn't as important as the fact that, having revealed itself, we naturally had to fight it. I went to look for my grandfather to ask if we had a .50 cal revolver, but I could only find a pepper-box revolver (Only in the dream it was an actual pepper box/shaker with a revolver handle. I remembered wondering how the bullets could fit through the tiny holes).

Then someone else found a .30-30 or a .30-06 and started doing some actual damage, but Nidhogg wasn't seriously affected; it might have moved a little. It seems like a couple other people started shooting too. Finally I found my grandfather to ask about the .50, but that's about the point where the dream fades.

This might need to become a book at some point...