A childhood dream

I had this dream and wrote it down when I was about 14, so the main players are family members: my mom, stepmom and siblings. There's also an old man who looks like Wilford Brimley. We are all in the midst of climbing a treacherous mountain with a fortresslike monastery on top. Falling rocks and dirt roll past us, and we look up and see that evil-looking monks are throwing themselves off the monastery walls. (Maybe I was prophesying my future Umberto Eco fascination!) The Wlford Brimley man tells us that we'd better hurry and get to the top, because when all the monks are dead, the mountain and everything on it will disappear right out from under us. Luckily, one of the monks lusts for power, so he stays behind after all the others have killed themselves and names himself King of the Mountain.

When my group and I get to the top of the mountain, we sneak into the monastery through the storeroom, then follow WB through the building, climbing stairs and ladders until we reach a large room. In this room is a giant cat the size of a bison sitting next to a table and holding a bowl of soup in its paw. Old WB takes a piece of bread from the table and dips it in the soup, and suddenly, strange words appear on the bread. Apparently it's a magic map of the monastery, and WB follows it until we come to the throne room, where the King of the Mountain is sitting looking paranoid. He does some kind of magic when he sees us, and presto, we are magically expelled from the building and find ourselves looking up at the walls from outside. We sneak in through the storeroom again, climb to the cat room, go through the bread-dipping routine again, and wait for a message to appear. This time all it says is "A1 - 1" WB reacts to this as if it were a bomb timer showing 2 minutes: he yells "Run!" and we take off as a group trying to get out of the building. We can hear the King of the Mountain chasing us and shrieking terribly, but we manage to stay ahead of him. At the end we all have to jump from a broken staircase and run out of the storeroom, but the giant cat appears suddenly and cuts us off.

Old WB comes forward and explains that the monks and priests of the mountaintop monastery have been tormenting his family for generations and he wants it to stop. The giant cat agrees, as long as the old man agrees to be the last victim. He agrees, and we all make it home safely. A week later, the old man starts acting strangely, getting up in the middle of the night and pulling people out of their beds, or moving his own bed into another room. Then one night he just disappears, and so does the mountain and the monastery on top of it.