Harry Potter in America

Please, no spoilers for the last book in the comments on this one.

For part of the dream I was Harry Potter, and for part I was observing him from above and behind his head. It also kept flashing forward or flashing back, so that I didn't really have it in chronological order. I think I'll type it in order, though.

Most of it happened in the Shrieking Shack. Not the one from the books, though; this was a large haunted house in a ghost town somewhere in the U.S. A lot of people were trapped inside, and Harry had to go in and get them out. But they had to wait to actually come out for a while, because a bunch of other wizards were dealing with some sort of threat in the town first.

The problem was that the house had bad effects on people who stayed in it. The biggest one seemed to be lethargy; some of the people had been in there for days or weeks and had no concept of how much time had passed. They just sat huddled in the rooms in a stupor. Another effect was a poisoning of the mind, which could lead to the people being taken over by evil spirits or something, but that seemed to need strong thoughts and emotions to fuel it, and the lethargy counteracted such things. Stirring the people up to move them out of the house was dangerous in this regard.

There were dozens of people, maybe as many as 100 in all. They were all muggles I think. There were families. I had to get them all to wake up and move into the front room, so we could make sure everyone was accounted for and be ready to go out the front doors when it was safe. The other wizards came in and out briefly to give and receive updates, but they didn't want to stay inside for too long. There were problems with people hallucinating and wandering off while in dream worlds, and the ones who were made fully alert couldn't understand what was going on. It was dangerous if they became angry, because the house could harness that energy for evil. It was equally dangerous if the children became frightened, and how was I supposed to prevent that? The really dangerous thing, though, was magic. I could not under any circumstances use magic in there.

I remember trying to coax a teenage girl out of a small room where she was sitting by herself. When she started coming around, she thought I was a monster, and the evil in the house converged on and through her, and I nearly used magic in self-defense, which would have made it vastly more powerful. Somehow I got her to calm down and come out. Later she was herself again, but had picked up a lot extra knowledge from the encounter, mostly about the history of the house and the thousands of people it had killed over the years.

I have no memories of coming out or leaving the village, but afterwards we had to get away quickly. For some reason I was riding with a British witch who had never driven outside of England before. We were the only ones driving; everyone else had planes and helicopters. We had radio contact with them. She kept driving on the left side of the road. She would move over to the right when a car was oncoming, then move back to the left after it had passed. Someone in a helicopter kept telling her to drive on the right side, reminding her that this was how the rules worked for "peasants". I repeatedly offered to drive.

Later, I was in a treehouse with an older wizard talking about my experience in the house. At one point I started sobbing vehemently, and saying "Don't you understand? I saw my father in there! I almost stayed, because it made me think he was in there, but it wasn't really him."