The Lava Tree

This one was a bit weird in that it was really quite a bit like watching a movie rather than being a part of the goings on.

There was a guy that lived alone in the woods, and he had a bit of a quirky personality. He reminded me a bit of Mark Wahlburg. He was living in a house that was supposed to be like Mike's (former step-father) house. In this version of the house, though, the basement was very different. Instead of being four and a half to five feet tall, it was a full eight or nine feet tall, or maybe even ten. Also, instead of it being under the middle of the house, it was under the bedroom on the front end of the house that used to be my room.

In the basement, in the corner closest to grandmamma's house, was a large tree trunk growing out of the floor. It was ten to twelve feet across and hollow with a cross formation in the middle, so there were actually four hollow "sections" in the trunk. Deep down in the hollow parts, below the level of the basement floor, were pools of lava.

The man went down into the basement at one point, and he had to chop off the top part of the trunk that was coming out of the floor because the tree would grow in spurts periodically. Whenever it grew, there was a loud mechanic thunk, and it would suddenly be about a foot taller. It did this every few hours.

Then we were outside, and a young-ish business looking woman with her hair up in a bun showed up and was interested in the man. They wound up walking around and looking at various things throughout the house. After a short bit she brought up something about the fact that he lived off deep in the woods somewhere, and the way she said it was trying to imply that he was creepy for being that way. He seemed to want to make a decent impression with the woman, and he wound up kind of stumbling his way though the conversation, trying to keep her interested.

I'm not sure if the woman was still around for this or not, but I started seeing some of the chores that he had to do periodically around the house. One of the main ones was that he had to go into the basement once a week and chop down the lava tree and take it outside because otherwise it would wind up growing up through the house. The math for this doesn't work out, of course, if it grows a foot every couple of hours and the basement is only about ten feet tall at best, but oh well... that's the way it was. I saw him outside with an axe and chains and stuff from chopping down the tree, and I wondered how me moves such a heavy tree to get it outside all by himself to chop it up.

Then the scene switched back in time, and I saw the first time that he discovered the way that the tree behaved. I think he had either been outside or in the room above the basement, and he heard the clunking sound of the tree growing. The higher it grew the faster it would grow until the mechanical thunks were coming about once a second. The tree started to push it's way up through the wooden floor planks of the bedroom and come up through the tree. He ran downstairs into the basement to start chopping it down as fast as he could.

After he was done chopping down the tree and had it back under control, the house needed to be repaired. Andy Griffith, Opie, and Aunt Bea were there, and there was a large warehouse area that was, I believe, in another part of the basement. They had a lot of large crane-like machinery, and Andy was trying to go around and inspect things (I think both the machinery AND the house) while Opie made notes about his observations.

Aunt Bea was wandering around and saying how she was worried that she wasn't doing anything to help, and she went over and tried to take Opie's job. Opie told her to ask Andy if she's doing the right thing, and he told them both that they're fine and repeated to them what they're each supposed to be doing.