There never was any wheelchair. There never was any wheelchair. There never was any wheelchair. Everyone on the bus chanted this as it whirled around me, flashing between being a bus full of tourists and… other things; brief, half-second glimpses of bright lights and carnivals and who knows what. And then they were holding me, a skull coming in towards the armpit of my lifted-up arm. And then with a twist and a thump I was AWAKE, lying there in my bed. None of the slow drifting-to-awareness of my normal waking up; it was like I just fell back into my body and there I was. I lay there slightly stunned for a moment*, then got up, put on my robe, and went to the kitchen, pretty much on autopilot. After a brief encounter with Nick (it’s a sunny day today! also the Northgate mall is turning into offices! also there is a section in its wikipedia page about terrorists and serial killers!), I picked up my phone. Not because I wanted to use it – but because I wanted to see if it still worked, because I have noted that whenever I pull it out in a dream, I always get a clunky substitute cobbled together out of 1990s tech. It was, indeed, an early-21st-century device that worked as expected, so I guess I’m really awake.
The wheelchair that wasn’t? Oh, that was from before. I was in a rainy parking lot, and watched a man push a wheelchair through it, and suddenly collapse; I helped him up, and he went to his friends without a word to me. And then the wheelchair was gone and I was on the bus and that’s where we came in, isn’t it?
Previously there had been a fairly coherent narrative where I was some other guy, who had traveled a long way to seek the advice of a very Vegas sort of mystic at some kind of convention; he was looking for help with an entity that had been connected to him for long enough that he’d bothered this mystic’s father for help, as well. He was rejected once more, and watched sadly as other people looking for advice were tapped to be in some sort of forming coven; he ended up in a brightly-lit store, watching these other people troop in and acquire flashy new Magic Wands. (Me? I thought. I don’t need one of their wands. I have my own. And there it was in my hand, the plastic one full of water and glitter that I’ve had iRL for several years.) It was kinda sad.
Before that there was a bunch of the usual dream nonsense about trying to use a bathroom that was ridiculously impractical. Usually that involves me trying to pee in a toilet that’s overflowing, or has been removed, or something; this time it was a taking a shower with a showerhead attached to the wall right next to the toilet. At least the showerhead was on a hose, so it was almost usable. Until the point where that wall and toilet were in the middle of a fast fashion shop in a mall and it seemed more appropriate to deal with buying my stuff and getting out. Very much routine Dream Problems.
But damn, that ending. Never woke up like that before, feeling like I just fell into my body with a thunk and woke all the way up in an instant.
* I may have felt compelled to do a quick banishing before getting up, it was that weird