Brain dredgings

I hate it when I have dreams that I can't explain, but I hate it more when my brain dredges up something that I not only can't explain, but that I've never even heard of before. Last night, I had the following dream. It doesn't make sense, but then when do dreams ever make sense?

I was in a garage of some sort, or factory or something like that. I distinctly remember a thick industrial oily smell, that iron and petroleum tang that hangs in the back of your nose and throat. The place was cold, but not unbearably so. I was a mechanic, I think, and by the costuming, it was in the late 40s, early 50s, if I had to guess. Not sure where I was, but I know that my co-worker, Frank, was British.
The dream opened as we were sitting down to lunch, which I can't remember what it was, other than I had a hot drink with it, coffee I think. We talked about the daily current events, of which I can not remember any, and ate happily. After we finished eating, Frank went over to a shelf, and got out a board game. It was called Conflict, and played a little like Stratego. We played a game, and then we went back to work, but only for a little while, when we noticed it had started to snow. Frank commented that his wife was going to be cross with him if he was late, and that we better get finished with the work we were doing, so we could both go home a little early. We were working on a truck, Frank was working on the engine, and I was busy rebuilding the transmission. I distinctly remember my hands cramping up because of the cold, and asking Frank to put more coal in the stove.
Well, a few hours went by, and a few inches of snow accumulated on the ground. By the time we were ready to go, it was getting dark, and the snow was coming down fiercely. Frank and I agreed that we were stuck there for the night, and that it would be easier to just stay than to traverse the roads that might not get plowed at all that night.
After calling our wives, we played more Conflict(apparently, we loved this game and had a great rivalry) and we had fun just hanging out for the rest of the evening. There were cots in the closet of the break room, I guess for those times when you have a long job and have to stay overnight, or bad weather like we were experiencing. In the middle of the night, I was awakened by a huge crash, and when we went to look, a tree had fallen in the storm, a maple I believe, and crashed through the corrugated iron roof and on to the truck that we had been repairing that day. Frank and I looked at it with old flashlights, and decided that there wasn't much we could do about it just then, and that we should try to get more sleep until morning.
Morning came, and Frank and I went out to assess the damage. The snow had stopped falling, and it was that blindingly bright, crisp kind of morning that can only come after a snow storm. The roof had absorbed most of the impact of the tree falling, and the truck seemed more or less okay, other than the container part of it being caved in a bit. Still, we thought we could hammer that out a lot easier than we could fix the cab, if the tree had gone through that. The roof was another matter. We didn't own the place, but we were our own bosses, so I guess that means we rented out the facility.
Frank called the owner of the building, Tom, and told him about the damage, and then proceeded to look very troubled. After getting off the phone with Tom, Frank turned to me and told me that Tom said it was our problem, that acts of god weren't covered in our rental agreement, and that we'd have to fix it ourselves. We agreed that not much could be done that day except for getting rid of the tree, and Frank decided he'd go home and get his chainsaw while I tried to pick up as many of the branches as I could. As I started trudging around the snow, the dream faded and I woke up.

Now, that dream seems pretty normal, but that's just it. It's perfectly normal, and congruous, and made sense internally to itself and to me. The oddest part about it was the clarity, and the things that I just can't explain away, like the following:

• I don't drink coffee, but I LOVED it in the dream. This is not a big deal, I know a lot of coffee drinkers, and I like the smell of it, and I had a cup of tea last night.
  
• I have never seen a transmission taken apart, but I clearly saw the transmission, and knew how to take it apart and clean it and put it back together again in the dream. I can't describe it now, other than there being lots of oily gears and pins and what not.
  
• The fact that a snow storm came upon us without us really knowing about it was odd because I normally know what the weather is going to be like, and if it was today, we'd know about a big storm like this for days in advance. However, in the 1950s, there was little weather forecasting, and certainly not the computerized models that we see today. Looking around on the web, the late 1950s is really when weather forecasting started to take off with the help of computers. Still, in a small town, they would know that snow could be coming, but might not know how powerful a storm might be.
  
• The snow plowing in the 50s wasn't that great either, especially in small towns, so my not being surprised by being stranded was notably accurate for the time period.
  
• The biggest thing that struck me this morning was the game of Conflict. It stands out as the most vivid part of the dream, and I distinctly remember the box that I have pictured above, and remembered playing the game on a board that looked almost identical to the one for that game, and I very much remember there being skunks on the dice, which is also accurate. Now the weird part: I've never seen or heard of that game before. It was a game that was produced by Parker Brothers from 1940 to 1972, and again fits the time frame of the dream. When I woke up this morning, I asked my wife if Conflict was the British name for Stratego, because Frank was British and we were playing Conflict. Granted, the game itself doesn't play much like Stratego, but maybe that's the analogy that my brain came up with to explain it.

What does this all mean? Probably nothing. But it was just another in a long line of dreams/deja vu/whatever that seem to haunt me for days afterward.