But it wasn't a dream. It was a place! And you, and you, and you, and you were there!

Long and insanely detailed dream last night...

Bobbi and I were living in a house in Tennessee, in some area that reminded me of the west side of Chattanooga, with lots of vertical topography. It was a '60s ranch, something of a fixer-upper, hugely rambling, with a pool, and overlooking some interstate from the back yard and thus crazy reasonably-priced.

The ground shook like an earthquake, and Bobbi looked on her iPhone (this should have been the 'This is all a dream' alert for me, right there) to see what happened, and I ran out in the back yard and looked across the interstate to see that the very tall sign for the truck stop/gas station half a mile down the road was a twisted ball of wreckage on the ground, and all the roads around it were lined with the flashing blue and red strobes of emergency vehicles.

Apparently there was now a huge fire and hillsides were burning and Bobbi wanted to go take pictures, and so we piled into her little Hyundai Accent (now inexplicably right-hand drive) and set off.

We're driving up this one-lane elevated on-ramp towards the part of the interstate that is wreathed in smoke and I'm peering out the windshield, worried about stopped cars ahead when suddenly there's a grizzly bear rearing up on its hind legs in the middle of the road! I look over at Bobbi and she's asleep! I shake her awake and she swerves around the bear.

But then the concrete chute ahead of us is full of bears! And moose! And bears fighting moose! Obviously they have fled the forest fires in the surrounding hills for the safety of the elevated freeway. I wake Bobbi again to steer us through the slalom of battling woodland monsters, and as I do, I see this Chewbacca-looking thing go running the other way down the shoulder! "Did you see that? Was that a Sasquatch?"

And then we get to the parking lot of the local medical school/research hospital/Umbrella Corp. laboratories, and go inside and run into LabRat and Stingray and the four of us wind up running up and down deserted corridors with Beretta 92s, shooting up the weird ghost kids from The Shining and cleaver-wielding lab-coated mad doctors like a first-person shooter.

And we get to a more populated part of the place and we're trying to act all nonchalant in this lobby, waiting for an elevator alongside a bunch of people wearing scrubs, one of whom is pushing this kid in a wheelchair who is wearing a gingham dress like Dorothy and staring at me with these big creepy unnatural china doll eyes like painted glass ping pong balls. Three of them. Eyes, that is. Three big creepy eyes.

We ducked into a storage room, hoping to boost some scrubs ourselves so we could blend in better with the locals, but there weren't any in there except for a few odds and ends that would have been too small on Hervé Villechaize or would have hung off André the Giant like a circus tent. The last thing I remember before I woke up, we were looting the deserted campus bookstore for anything that might be of use...