(Male) The dream took place after a small scale uprising of zombies. Yeah, yeah, I know exactly where the dream came from. I was watching a stupid zombie movie the day before I had this dream. But the zombie uprising was very localized and contained. Even though there were zombies stumbling around, it really hadn’t disrupted society too much. At the most, the zombie attacks had thinned things out so the town had a slightly under populated, slightly run down feel. Oh, and everyone carried rifles with them where ever they went, just casually slung over their shoulders. In the dream it was the middle of the night and for some reason I needed some cash, so I ask everyone in my house if they want to go for a ride up to the bank. (Cash machines still worked. Heck, money still had value so it wasn’t a ful-scale zombie apocalypse at all.) Everyone in the house was still up even though it was the middle of the night. I didn’t get the sense that they were keeping watch, in fact, I think my son was playing video games. My daughter agreed to ride along with me. It was a nice summer night, not yet too hot. There were a few people out on the streets and heck, there were a few zombies out on the streets too. Just a good night for a walk… though all things being equal, I’m glad I was driving a car. There were no street lights though, now I think about it. The only illumination was from advertising, or signs in shop windows. I drive in the bank parking lot and it’s pretty safe because there’s a large parking lot and it’s entirely empty. I get some cash out of the money machine but as I’m getting back to the car, I see a zombie shambling toward me across the parking lot. It’s no big thing. I take my rifle off my shoulder, steady it against the hood of the car, take aim… and miss. Miss completely. I shoot again, very carefully lining up the shot. Again a miss. It’s getting closer and this shouldn’t be a big thing. It’s a rifle and the creature is maybe 20 feet away. I miss again and I’m scared because I’ve let the thing get so close I don’t think I can get in the car and drive off before it attacks. I’m afraid for my little girl because she’s in the car with the window rolled down and likely the zombie will get her first. Just then I woke up.

I dreamed about what I guess was a virus or something. It would affect people without any warning. One minute the person would be fine and the next, horribly afflicted. The symptoms were horrific and disgusting. The sufferer’s skin would break out in huge sores that would pop like bubbles on the surface of boiling water. Literally, the skin would turn liquid and the person would dissolve in front of your eyes. The whole course of the virus took only a couple minutes so you could very easily watch someone melt away while you were, say, standing side by side, waiting for an elevator. The most horrible part came next, though. Within a couple more moments, the sufferer would be reconstituted, better than before, even their clothes would be cleaner as if the virus used every bit of matter even the dirt when building its monster. I say monster because this beautiful creature that appeared resembled the person but it would attack and devour whoever was standing closest to them, all with this wide, terrifying grin.

I witnessed this transformation at a wedding. It must have been in the early days of the outbreak because people didn’t know enough to avoid crowds. The virus struck the father of the bride. One moment he was standing at the altar with this daughter, the next he was a puddle of goop on the floor and the next he was radiantly dressed in a glowing white suit, his gray hair now slightly tinged with yellow blond. He reached out into the audience and grabbed someone at random whom he started to rend to pieces and devour.

We didn’t know how the virus spread but we knew it was susceptible to microwaves of a very specific frequency. I had a small, hand-held device that would neutralize all the of the virus within my general proximity. The hypothesis was that we might be able to kill the virus in the resurrected person and that the person might be OK, maybe a little messed up in the head after what they’re been up to but physically OK. This was an untested hypothesis though. I was sent in to the place where the wedding had been, or maybe it was just where an outbreak had occurred. There were still pockets of the crowds huddled around the grounds of the hotel, maybe a very glamorous church. I located the area where the target was. It was up a soaring flight of stairs that had no railing and that opened into the very spacious entry area of this hotel. Sunlight streamed in the plate glass windows that ran from the floor up several stories. I carefully walked up the stairs. At the top of the stairs were two preachers I knew years and years ago. They had their arms reached out in blessing. They spoke to me as if I would be doing some kind of exorcism when all I really was going to do was a scientific test. A test that would result in me being torn apart and eaten if it didn’t work. But the gist of what they were saying was that it would be the patient’s choice to get better and if it didn’t work, I shouldn’t blame myself.

Then I saw the creature coming around the corner through a pair of open double doors. It wasn’t the father of the bride I had seen before, it was actually a woman I knew. She looked statuesque, immense, regal like some of the portraits of Queen Victoria I’ve seen. But instead of a sceptre she held a tiny baby, her daughter even though her actual daughter is much older. She seemed to float instead of walk which was particularly uncanny for how large she looked.

She approached. I didn’t know what to do.

(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.

(Male, 40’s) There were zombies everywhere but they seemed to be relatively fragile and explosive. One good hit with my flame thrower and they popped like a balloon filled with hydrogen. Imagine human sized Zeppelins. They didn’t seem to have a very good sense of direction either, that is, they didn’t know where I was, so I waited for one floor of the warehouse to fill up with zombies, then I pulled myself up through a hatch to the second floor and ignited the zombies I could see. The flames spread through the whole first floor. But the flames also attracted more zombies. I lured them up floor by floor and then I ran down the fire escape and burned the whole building. This was very strange, especially because my flame-thrower looked like a vacuum cleaner. The handle was a hollow tube and the bag was filled with some kind of combustible gas or liquid. I would compress the bag, like a bag-pipe, I guess and flames would shoot out of the tube.

So now I was down on the ground floor of this grimy, bombed out city, one infested with zombies. And this parade of other survivors starts making its way down the street. We all have weapons that are about as insane as my vacuum-cleaner-flame-thrower. We carefully walk down a few blocks and we gain a few folks with every building we pass. But then it occurs to me that some of the folks who are joining our parade don’t look much like survivors. They look more like zombies. In fact, once I start tallying up the number of zombies to survivors, even in our parade, they’ve got us outnumbered. And they’ve got us surrounded. The other survivors were starting to realize this as well and just as the zombies got ready to attack us, I woke up.

(Male) The dream took place in a cottage that friends of mine used to have when we were kids. But instead of being on a lake, the cottage was just in a normal, old neighborhood. One night, zombies attacked. Nothing too unique or special about the zombies, just old-fashioned, slow-moving, brain-eating zombies. They were more or less easy to keep out despite the long rows of windows at the front. We had retreated upstairs.

But we survived til dawn. For some reason these zombies couldn’t be out in daylight, which made things rather convenient for us. I went downstairs and found a friend of mine on the couch. I thought he was a zombie but he was just hung over. I went outside and talked with my neighbors who were all very angry. I learned that many people had tried to escape the city so there was a huge traffic jam and then when nightfall came, the zombies just ate people in their cars, one by one, like a buffet table.

Though our neighborhood had been attacked it didn’t look like anyone had been hurt. We knew we wouldn’t be so lucky tonight.

When night fell, the folks in our house retreated to the second story of the cottage, plugged in our gas generator — which we knew wouldn’t last forever — and then used the electricity to power our guitar amps. We played this really weird psychedelic music all night long. We had destroyed the staircase so we were sort of luring all the zombies to our first floor for some reason, like a big roach motel. We could hear them moving downstairs, moaning like they were singing along with the music.

When I woke up from this dream it was still dark and I was even scared to move.

(Female, mid-teen) This dream took place in a small town. A tornado had just ripped through the center of the town, including right through the town’s high school where it had killed almost everyone. Life was just starting to get back to normal.

..Life was just starting to get back to normal…

A mother was in her kitchen working when she looked out her back window and saw the body of a high school girl lying face down in her back yard. It had been dropped there by the tornado. The mother called the officials and let them know. There were sounds of someone coming down the stairs. It was the mother’s five year old daughter. In the dream, my perspective shifted so that I was the little girl. The mother met the girl (me) as the girl (I) came into the kitchen and tried to block the view of the back window so the girl wouldn’t see the dead high school girl back there. But I looked around the side of the mother and I saw the dead high school girl. She was standing at the back window, waving at me, smiling. She was creepy dead, bruised, broken spine, leaves in her hair, that kind of thing. I woke up in the middle of the night and was scared to look at any of the windows in my room.