I just had a strange and vivid dream in which a large bear had somehow got into my house. (Not my house, actually; I seemed to be living with a largish family which included, for instance, a completely fictitious Uncle Henry.) It seemed quite happy in there and wasn't trying to kill or eat anyone, but most of us were nervous of it (of course) and wanted it gone. Only you can't exactly argue with a large black bear, and we weren't quite sure who you call in the UK when you have a problem with a bear. We tried to lure it outside once or twice, but there seemed to be a bit of confusion: occasionally we'd think we'd managed it, but find it indoors again. We didn't seem to be very good at bear-luring. It also didn't help that at least one member of the family seemed totally untroubled by the bear's presence, and never seemed particularly bothered about helping our eviction efforts by having the right doors open and shut.

Eventually we noticed that there was one time of day when it seemed to particularly want to be outdoors, so we left the door open to let it out and then shut and locked it once it had left, breathing a sigh of relief.

Only it didn't end there; the bear was subsequently seen lurking around the garden and making life difficult for people trying to get in and out of the house. So the family thought about it a bit and eventually came up with a plan to scare it away for good using electrified booby-traps in the garden. This involved people going outdoors, of course, to set the traps.

Now comes the twist in the tale which really made me think my subconscious had turned into a short-story writer.

While an unspecified family member and I were outdoors fiddling with electric wires, we were grabbed and dragged into the bushes by other members of the family, and tied up. I think it was around this point that the dream switched to an omniscient third-person perspective, in which we see an identical-looking copy of me return to the house, which turns out to now be completely full of people who look like my family but are in fact were-bears, and have just finished kidnapping the real family one by one and taking their places. The original bear turns out to be the alternate form of the fake Uncle Henry, who (unlike the rest of the fake family) happened not to be happy spending all his time in human form. The real family, by now, is all either dead or tied up in the bushes.

At this point the story ended, because I woke up and went ‘wow, I have to write this down’. It's a perfect natural end point for the short story anyway, though.

The thing I find fascinating about this, as a dream, is its sheer coherence and plot consistency. There were admittedly some slightly dreamlike oddities I've glossed over in the description above (notably that the original bear was inexplicably carrying around a telescope, and the reason it liked to be outside at a certain time of day was that it had apparently learned that looking through the telescope at things was fun), but the twist at the end actually explained what had seemed like dreamy inconsistencies at the start (such as the mysterious difficulty in evicting the bear, and the one other family member who didn't seem bothered by its presence), and thereby turned the whole thing into really quite a satisfying narrative experience. It's almost as if it had been planned from the start by an actual writer. The idea that a subconscious without free access to my logic centres was able to come up with that in sequential order is frankly very impressive.

Unless, of course, my memories of the first half of the dream were subtly modified during or after the second half, to make them match up to it better; I don't think that would be beyond the bounds of possibility, since memories of dreams are pretty fragile in general, but that would have been pretty impressive too! It paints a picture of my subconscious as a short-story writer with a word processor, who gets to go back and edit the beginning bits once it knows how the story's going to end.