Sallyacious

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July 24, 2007

Zombie Dreams

I spent much of last night fending off zombies. In my dreams. God only knows where that particular imagery came from. I mean, zombies. Really. One moment I was having a conversation in an empty dining room with a rather odd but seemingly nice little old lady and the next she was lunging for my throat and I had to fend her off with a chair.

I knew immediately what the problem was. "Zombie!" I yelled at the top of my lungs, waving the chair at her head and hoping some of my friends would hear me. There was none of this denial or inability to figure out what was going on that you see in so many zombie movies. I caught on right away. My friends got there just as I killed her for reals by shoving a chair leg through her left eye socket and scrambling her brains.

And then we worked our way through the house, my friends and I, trying to avoid/kill the various zombies that hung out there.

Interestingly, my zombies were just like normal people. Only a little slower. They talked a little slower, they thought a little slower, they moved a little slower. And they had a hungry look in their eyes. Those were the only differences, though. There was none of the arms raised, moaning, shuffling walk thing. Unless they got into attack stance. Then some of that stuff happened. But mostly they were regular-seeming humans.

They also seemed to do a lot of work in pairs. I remember one zombie told me awful jokes while his wife worked her way around behind me and attacked me with a chair. They had looked like a harmless enough couple. At least, I thought they were, untill the chair smashed between my shoulder blades. After that, and another round of screaming "Zombie!" and desperately searching for cover and a workable weapon, I started paying more attention to the behavior of those around me. That's what saved my bacon, in the end.

Looking back on the dream, the thing that amazes me most (aside from how quickly I figured it out and how normal the zombies all were) was the underlying emotion of the dream. You'd think a dream about zombies would be a really scary dream. A nightmare, even. Like those dreams where someone's watching you and you can't move. Or chasing you and you're running uphill through molasses.

But no.

Certainly my anxiety level picked up when I was actually fighting off zombies, but the whole thing actually felt more like Shawn of the Dead than Night of the Living Dead or 28 Days Later. Like those bits in Shawn when they're whacking zombies to music with pool cues. Those bits. Not the "oh my god we're all gonna die" bits. It had a sense that this was just the way it was and I was going to have to learn to deal with this reality. Which is especially odd knowing that several weeks ago I had a nightmare (that still disturbs me) about baked goods growing out of my head. (Don't ask.) I woke up from that dream in a cold sweat. I didn't exactly wake up laughing this morning, but I was mostly nonplussed because, zombies? What?

That's not my normal dream subject. It's like I borrowed someone else's plotline. Out there somewhere in Dreamland, somebody else was having odd and urgent conversations about rain and horseradish and elephants with people they'd never seen before or trying to find some special item in a crowded marketplace where people were packed so tightly they could barely move. Or giving birth to kittens. (Seriously!) And they were most likely as confused upon waking as I was because, "Dude, where did my zombie dreams go?"

Posted by sally at July 24, 2007 10:52 PM

Comments

Posted by: glasbeth at July 25, 2007 09:43 AM

Posted by: Sallyacious at July 25, 2007 09:51 AM

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