(Male, 40’s) I was chasing someone through these very dark, black streets that were also slick with rain. I had lost the trail and was a bit lost when I realized I wasn’t in a city at all. What I thought all along was the city scape of buildings was actually a long backdrop painting. The canvas was stretched all along the side of a large semi trailer. Then I looked around me and realized that everything I had been running through, everything that had felt like a city was actually just cutout flats on a very very small stage. How could I have ever taken that to be the street I was running down?

I looked back at the back drop and noticed that it had been slashed with huge long cuts running lengthwise. The truck was in the middle of a field. It was the middle of the afternoon. There was nothing else, absolutely nothing else as far as the eye could see. Then there was a young woman. She had very straight, plain blond hair about shoulder length… and a HUGE knife, easily a foot long that she waved around like she was very comfortable with it. It was clear that she was the one who had sliced up the backdrop. She wanted me to stay and talk but I said No I had to head back to town because I had to pee. She laughed and said “You’re in a field. Just go ahead and pee here.” I replied, still eager to get the heck away from her “You just want to see my penis.” She replies by grabbing the back of her t-shirt and pulling it off in one smooth movement so she’s standing there, topless and bare-breasted still brandishing this immense knife. I am absolutely terrified — I don’t want to piss her off but I don’t have a clue what to do.

(Male) This wasn’t as much a nightmare as just a strange, strange dream despite its subject matter. I was attending my own funeral. It was being held in this little rural chapel, one maybe 20′ by 20′ in dimensions. The walls were bright white, the pews too, even my coffin was white. Bright summer sunlight gleamed in the windows. There was a crowd of maybe two dozen people and everyone was milling around acting so happy. I was milling through the crowd too and people were shaking my hand, smiling, as if they were congratulating me. I think some people were even smoking cigars, like I had had a baby or something. There was also a large sheet cake with a thick layer of that sugary white frosting usually found on wedding cakes. I was cutting it into pieces and handing it out to people when I realized that this wouldn’t be a very good lunch. I left the funeral and went to a small diner next door and ordered up a gallon of soup and some sandwiches to go. When it came time to pay, I seemed to have coupons in my wallet for a free gallon of soup and a free box of sandwiches which meant that all I had to pay was the tax. As I was leaving, I invited the guy behind the counter to come to my funeral, that we’d have plenty of cake.

(Male) I used to live in the old sprawling farmhouse that happened to located right next to a pretty busy road. The house had been broken up into apartments. Prior to the time I lived there, two of the former occupants, both older women, in totally separate incidents had been struck and killed by automobiles while trying to cross the road. All that really happened.

In the dream, I am laying down on a couch in the living room of the apartment. A woman who I don’t recognize shakes my shoulder, trying to get me to wake up. I open my eyes a little. She says “Go for a walk with me.” I close my eyes and try to go back to sleep. The woman is more insistent. “You must come for a walk with me. Now. Come.” I’m not certain about this next part because it’s hard to describe but it almost felt as if she was trying to push her arms into my body, to make me move from inside, almost as if she was trying to get inside my body to make me move. But I stayed on the couch and eventually she went away.

It wasn’t until I woke up that I remembered the women who had been killed going for a walk just outside. It still gives me shivers to tell this story.

(Male, 30’s) I am a teacher and in this dream, which I’ve had four or five times, I’m on my way to work. I take a couple back roads on my way and somewhere along the line I get a little lost. I’m driving down a dirt road, not exactly certain where I am, and there in the middle of the road several people are standing. I slow down and roll down my window to talk with them and they offer me a gun to take to work. They highly encourage me to take it. So I do. It’s a handgun. I keep driving and I find my way to work and then I’m walking down the hallway at school when I realize that I still have the gun in my hand. What the heck am I doing? Why didn’t I get rid of it on the ride in or at least leave it in the car? I’m embarrassed, actually quite scared that someone will see me with this thing. I try to stuff the gun into my pocket but it won’t fit. I wake up feeling afraid and uneasy.

This nightmare took place after the zombie apocalypse had struck just about everywhere. We were living in this sprawling country farmhouse and had invited the neighbors and basically everyone we knew who were still alive for a potluck. (My conscious mind is rationalizing here that since the electricity had stopped we all had a lot of food spoiling in freezers that had to be used up.) Anyway it was getting dark and the guests were largely rather late. My wife started asking me about certain things that I didn’t think about, like we’d planned to feed everyone in the backyard but of course without electricity we couldn’t see anything. Not to mention the possible trouble if someone made yummy noises at the potluck and were mistaken for a zombie… We didn’t know if zombies would be attracted if we lit a big bonfire. But we got into the worst fight when she asked me about how much ammo we had for the guns, as if I could just run out to the store and pick up some more if we were running low. Well, we were running low. We panicked, argued a bit more and then decided that it must be possible to kill a zombie by hitting it really, really hard over the head. It became my job to come up with enough big heavy sticks so that our guests could each carry one around… while trying to balance a plate full of food in the other hand and eat at the same time.

Time crept on. We stopped fighting. The food got cold. No one showed up. Everything felt very silent and icy as that deep country dark fell around us.

(Male) I was at a farm, along with an aunt and uncle of mine and a whole family of people from the neighborhood where I grew up. In the dream, they had just been featured on a television commercial for fast food tacos. For some reason we didn’t stay in the farmhouse but rather in the barn, and mostly in the cement silo. A spiral walkway had been rigged around the outside to allow us access to the living spaces higher up in the silo. When we left the silo, we were always looking over our shoulders, being careful of our surroundings. I walked through the farm yard with my aunt and uncle. My uncle showed me a new harrow he had bought. It looked exactly like his old harrow, which also looked like a toy I had had as a child.

…The area was over-run with zombies, but a kind I’d never exactly seen before…

The reason why we were so conscious of what went on around us, of course, were the zombies. The area was over-run with zombies, but a kind I’d never exactly seen before. They were gray and wrinkly like a prune from top to bottom. When they moved, clouds of dusty dirt flaked off them, like dustbowl golems. They didn’t seem much like animated corpses, though they were humanoid and extremely slow moving. However, the zombies were very powerful and it was impossible to get away if one caught you. The one fact we had in our favor was that the zombies weren’t able to climb, not stairs or ladders or even up the spiral ramp around the side of our silo. We were safe as long as we stayed on the second story. However, we had to keep the zombie population under control like they were an agricultural pest or something.

It was night. I was downstairs in the barn, around the stalls where we once kept cattle. I didn’t see the zombie until I had almost walked into it. He growled, low, deep, elemental. Before I knew it, there was another one behind me. I started to panic but I got out the handgun I carried in the dream and I shot both zombies. The first one collapsed into a pile of gray sand at least a yard high. The second one kept moving. Suddenly, I became aware of other zombies all around me. If I kept my head and kept moving I could likely get around them all. I started running and just as I cleared the barn, my foot slipped. I woke up.