You’ve heard this advice before but it bears repeating: double check before sending someone to the morgue. This goes for family members, “private undertakers” and heck, probably especially for the folks who work at the morgue.
Sometimes folks are just unconscious, not fully deceased.
http://www.capetimes.co.za/man-wakes-up-in-morgue-1.1104810
(Male, 50′s) Extremely strange and disturbing dream that only incidentally had a zombie in it. I guess that’s enough to make it a nightmare, right?
I was in this house which at times was the house where I live now and at times was the house where I grew up, even though it really didn’t resemble either of those actual houses very much. There was a big apple tree in the back yard.
And there was Richard Pryor. He was just hanging out. He might have been a relative or he might have been just a friend but he was just there and we were all acting like it was no big thing. I haven’t thought of Richard Pryor for years by the way though I used to think he was pretty funny. He looked good, like he did back in the 70′s before all the freebasing coke stories came out. So there was me, Richard Pryor, the girl who later became my wife and a couple other people.
We were working on plans to remodel the house. We all were inside standing around the dining room table and then one of us would make a change to the set of plans, then we’d all walk out side to see what that would look like on the house. It was like as soon as we made a decision, it actually changed the house.
But we got mixed up a little. Some of us were changing the plans while others were checking the results, so I passed people coming back in as I was going out. And one time when I passed Richard Pryor, he wasn’t looking very good. His hair had changed to white and his skin was ashy grey. He was dead alright but he was still walking around. No one else seemed to realize it yet, and Richard Pryor didn’t even realize that he was a zombie yet so I still had some time before things got ugly.
But the only weapon I had was a hammer. I got it in my hand and I came up behind Richard Pryor. I knew that the only way to kill a zombie was to take its head completely off – at least that’s what I “knew” in my dream. So I was preparing to hammer at the back of his spine, over and over until his head fell off. It was going to be awful. I felt sick to my stomach thinking about all the gore and blood. When I raised the hammer behind my head, I woke up.
(Female, 40′s) I’ve been watching *Lost* on dvd so maybe that’s what brought on this dream about a group of zombie apocalypse survivors.
My partner and I were on a camping trip in a mountainous area. We had put up our tent and were making dinner when a group of armed people came into our camp. They started asking us questions like who we were and what we were doing there. When we answered them, they seemed relieved. They explained that now they knew that we were okay. Because we could talk, we weren’t zombies. Somehow my partner and I had missed the news reports that there was a zombie outbreak in this place. We weren’t safe in the woods, they said, so those people led us out of the mountains and back into town.
The town had a large university campus, and most of the survivors had moved to this area, we were told. Everything looked normal, but we were not to let that fool us. Danger was everywhere and especially after dark. Zombies were fast and clever but unable to talk.
My partner and I stayed at the university. We made a few friends and got to know the area. We went out to the bars with friends in the evening. I didn’t understand how life could appear to be going along normally if there was this zombie problem. Everything looked like it was working normally: the university had classes, the electricity was on, college students were playing frisbee and getting suntans.
My view of that relative ‘safety’ changed abruptly. My partner and I were walking home from the bar with four friends and a zombie appeared. We all ran as fast as we could. Someone fell down, and someone ran back to help him, hitting the zombie with a shovel. Then we all ran into a house and collapsed in the chairs and on the floor, gasping and trying to catch our breath. We looked at the friend who fell. “Are you alright?” someone asked him. He just nodded, out of breath. We should have been worried at that point, but we weren’t paying attention.
My partner and I went into the kitchen for a drink of water and so did two of the others, leaving the falling down guy and another guy alone in the living room. When we came back into the room, we realized our mistake. Both of them were silent, staring at us, hungry-looking.
We had been told that zombies couldn’t talk, but no one had told me they could communicate. As we watched, one guy’s head turned into a gray wavering smokey head sitting on his shoulders, and the other guy opened his mouth wide and inhaled this entire head, nodding like he understood. He exhaled the smoke, and the head materialized like normal. Then the second guy’s head turned into the same kind of gray wavering smoke, and the first breathed him in. This was how the zombies communicated. If we hadn’t been so utterly fascinated, we would have hauled our asses out of there, but we survivors just stood there watching.
When the zombies turned toward us and started to advance, we scrambled out of the house, pulling the door shut and holding it. “Hurry! Get the fire department!” the guys holding the door shut told me. The fire department would come and set the house on fire. That was a change, right? But it was the only way to deal with zombies.
(Male, 30′s) This wasn’t a nightmare like it was scary, just really really depressing.
It was long after the zombie apocalypse. Maybe 20 years. Humans had survived but so had zombies. We just couldn’t come up with a way to totally wipe them out. So I was walking down the street and I had to be careful to avoid the half dozen zombies that were just shuffling around. They weren’t really a threat. They felt like homeless people – a little smelly, shabbily dressed… well, homeless people with rotting faces, I guess.
But what was really depressing is that there was a general sense among the surviving humans that it was just a matter of time until we’d die out too. I know this is my rational wide-awake mind trying to make sense of things but maybe there weren’t enough people left of the right age to re-populate the planet. At least, we all were wandering around, bored and hungry, not really that much different than the zombies.
I’m not that a true-fan of zombies as a mega-genre but this credit sequence has enough crack-snapple-and-bop to get me interested in seeing the actual adaptation of the long-running comic “Walking Dead.”
And of course, here’s the actual trailer:
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid83327935001?bctid=59356961100
Subtle political commentary, it’s not. Continue reading
Zombies eat our brains, right? So it’s only fair that we should get to nibble on them as well.
Can we call the whole zombie craze, ah, “dead” so to speak, now that eight year old kids are asking that their birthday cakes be made in the shape of an undead corpse? Continue reading
If you sleep with the light on because you’re worried about the imminent zombie uprising, then I’m no so sure this product is what you’re looking for. Continue reading
I don’t mean make a zombie FOR yourself. I mean make yourself into a zombie.
Len Peralta makes these nice cartoon renderings of your face as if you were a brain-gobbling undead. (http://flipface.me/zombie/) Continue reading
(Female, 50′s) First of all, when I told my partner about this nightmare about zombies, he told me they weren’t zombies. So what the hell were they? Second, this dream was weird because it seemed to take place over days, maybe even weeks. Like I woke up and went to sleep and lived whole DAYS in this dream. The other weird thing about this dream was the depth of emotions I experienced during it. I felt things. Like really, really scared. And really, sad. And then really depressed.
In this dream, some friends were visiting us, and it was evening– just getting dark out. Not friends we really have, and we didn’t live in our real house, but in this cottage-like structure. Their van was parked in our driveway, and they were getting ready to leave. They were a couple and their three little kids; one was already buckled in his carseat. The husband stepped over to say hello to one of the neighbors.
“…there was nothing that could be done about the monsters. People went on with their lives…”
Then in the distance down the street, there came this band of marauding flesh-eating mutant humans. They attacked every human they saw and simply tore them apart. We watched for a moment, horrified– the woman and I– and then I called her two children, a boy and a girl, to me. She hopped in the back of the van and tried to get the child out of the carseat. I scooped up the other two children in my arms and ran into the house. I waited at the door, calling “Hurry, hurry” but it was too late. A monster reached into the van and pulled the woman out, and I covered the children’s eyes as the monsters tore her apart. I closed and locked the door, and then I started shutting and locking all the windows and pulling the curtains shut. The little girl wandered over to a window, and there was a monster on the other side. The monster said, “There’s a living one in there” and tried to reach in so I quickly pulled the girl away and shut the window and the curtain, and then I moved the the center of the room and made the children sit still on my lap. Then the monsters couldn’t see us any more.
So a few patterns emerged: They only came out at night. They could only see you if you moved. They could talk to each other, but they weren’t smart or organized enough to get into houses; they only caught people outside. They didn’t change the people they caught into monsters like them but tore them to shreds and ate them. The next day the father came to pick up the kids, and they went home. It was so sad and so scary.
But the weird thing was that people seemed to cope. There was nothing that could be done about the monsters, but people went on with their lives. Like, our teenage daughter went to college every day and to her job– just making sure to be inside by dark. My husband drove her somewhere that took longer than they’d planned so they stayed overnight to be safe, but I was so worried about them and so relieved when they came home the next day.
For the most part, life went on, although there were occasional deaths in the community because people forgot the rules and stayed out too late after dark. Everyone else was managing, but I was frightened and worried all the time. Really sad. And really depressed. I couldn’t see any point in doing anything anymore.
(Male, 40′s) I tried to tell this nightmare to someone and they just laughed because it sounded too much like slapstick comedy. But it was scary when I was having the dream. I also woke up in the middle of the night and had to go to the bathroom but thought twice about it, y’know, because of the zombies.
I was driving a twenty year old station wagon that used to belong to my Mom. I was going to a rock concert that was being held in an abandoned factory but to get there, I had to cross a lane of freeway exit ramp traffic that was moving very quickly. I gave up on the concert.
And somehow I ended up at the junior high school where my dad used to teach. Both my mom and dad are dead. The place was trashed, probably because of the zombie apocalypse, now I think of it. There was a demonstration happening in my dad’s old classroom. There was someone showing, I think, how to make gasoline or something. Where most science experiments would involve tiny beakers of chemicals, this guy was using huge vats of chemicals that sputtered and splashed from one container to the other. He concluded quickly, saying “I hope you all paid attention because you’re all on your own now.” The zombies had found our location.
We all exited the classroom quickly. As I passed a display case that was smashed in, I took a large ceramic chicken award. It was pink and it weighed a ton. I thought it might be a good weapon. We continued to move through the dark school and we got ourselves trapped in a glassed in hallway. There were zombies trying to get in at either end and there was another batch of zombies outside the windows trying to get in. I had an idea so I got on the loudspeaker and somehow made it sound like we were all in the auditorium. And for whatever reason, the zombies all ignored us and started shuffling off toward the auditorium. I thought this would be our opportunity to pick them off, one by one. I tried to sneak up behind one of the zombies and bash its brain in with the large ceramic chicken. This task proved much more difficult than I expected. After about a half a dozen blows, the zombie was no closer to being neutralized and in fact, I’d started to attract the attention of other zombies. I decided to join the others but they were gone.
(Female, 40′s) This was a weird dream, with very slow-moving action taking place over what felt like a long time. I was in a city, with all the survivors. Outside the city were the zombies. They were the old-fashioned slow-moving kind. There was a big fence around the entire city keeping the zombies outside. We survivors on the inside felt rather smug.
“…the people you knew were slowly disappearing too…”
But the problem was that the city was getting a little smaller every day. The zombies would manage to break through in one spot and take over a building and kill all the people in it. Then we would move the fence in and life would go on. The people you knew were slowly disappearing too. Near the end of the dream, we were down to about a dozen buildings and maybe only 100 survivors.
Then I walked into a room where there were 3 or 4 people down on the floor. “Are they zombies?” I asked someone. Then I realized that no, they were survivors like me. They were down on their hands and knees eating the carpet, because it was all that was left to eat.
Things were looking pretty grim.
(Male, 30′s) This nightmare I had kind of cracks me up when I write it down but there was nothing funny about it at the time. I’m almost embarrassed by how silly it sounds.
“…Seemed a pretty awful situation. …”
I was in the house where I grew up, a place I haven’t even seen in like 10 years. There were people on the front lawn who were doing something. I went out there to yell at them. They were painting the countertop of their kitchen cabinets. The paint was this hideous green, like a yellow green, a color from a 70′s rental property. I told them to get lost. And then there was a policeman who told me they’d be OK. See, their landlord was kicking them out because the building was being foreclosed and soon to be demolished so they were down on their luck. I asked the cop what was with the countertop and he said that the landlord was making them fix up the place or they’d lose their security deposit. Seemed a pretty awful situation.
I looked around the neighborhood and it was a decaying, urban nightmare. There were multi-story buildings that looked like they’d been bombed. Whole walls were missing, not just the windows which were all smashed out. The cop and I walked around a bit and there was just block after block of wasteland, tall buildings ready to collapse under their own weight.
“…”…It was a zombie. And it was a skunk. How much worse can you get from that!…”…”
That’s when we saw the skunk. It jumped out at the cop and started running for him like it wanted to bite him. The skunk was sealed in a plastic bag and chunks of its flesh were falling off. The cop was stupid, just standing there but I knew to start running away immediately. I knew somehow that this skunk was infected with the zombie plague, probably the same kind of epidemic that was causing the whole world to go to hell. The scientists has sealed it in a plastic bag to keep it safe because in this future skunks were an endangered specie. They were trying to protect the genetic material even though it was sick, er, I guess, dead. It was a zombie. And it was a skunk. How much worse can you get from that!
So I started running because I was afraid of what would happen when the cop turned to a zombie. Every pile of rubble I passed seemed to have another zombie creature creeping out of it. Possums, squirrels, a mangy old cat. I was just running and running, hopping over piles of rubble trying to get away and the terror was all around me.
This demented little goodie is made available by the mad geniuses at ThinkGeek.com. It’s perfect for folks who think that it’s not enough fun to come to a potluck with a jello shaped like a human brain. This one looks like the torso of a zombie.
The culinary possibilities are nearly endless. My next birthday cake had better be decorated like a graveyard complete with green colored coconut shavings (grass) with one of these little beauties erupting from a tomb with my name on it.
I bet this one slipped by the leftist media cultural elitists:
Man Bites and Chews Off Part of Another Man’s Arm!
Much of the commentary that’s appeared on the blogosphere surrounding this event assumes that the attacker was a zombie. OK, fine, fair enough. I see the resemblance at least to the early Romero-style zombies. Some nit-picking kill-joys were hung up on the fact that the attacker didn’t go for the guy’s brains.
But let’s back up for a moment. It’s it terrifying enough to think that this guy came up out of nowhere and bit a chunk out of someone’s arm? Isn’t it even a bit creepier in fact that the guy WASN’T a zombie?
(Male, 30′s) I want to start off saying that I don’t usually have nightmare and I don’t find zombie movies to be at all scary but after this dream, well, maybe.
“… I’m pretty sure things won’t be fine, even though I don’t know exactly what’s wrong at this point…
I was in the car with my family and we were driving home, back into town and there’s something not right. There are walls of tall chain link on either side of the road. There are folks trying to head away from us, out of town. They keep telling us it’s the wrong way, but we’re pretty sure that if we get back to our house we’ll be OK. Eventually we get to a place where the traffic is just entirely stopped so we have to abandon our car.
We start walking and walking with all our kids too and still there are people rushing off OUT of town. They’re all on the other side of this chain link fence. For some reason we get convinced that that’s the right side to be on so we get through the fence somehow. We try to make our way to our house but we can’t.
My wife just wants to sit down on a park bench. She thinks every thing will just be fine but I’m pretty sure things won’t be fine, even though I don’t know exactly what’s wrong at this point. I can’t make her come along but my son follows me and we start heading, I think, we’re still heading back to our house. The plan is that we can hole up there and be safe. She says she’ll meet us there in a little while.
We just get a little bit further away, not noticeably closer to safety, when I hear this sound. It’s like a concrete dragging along concrete but lower, much lower in pitch. Then I realize it’s a groan. We look around the next corner and there is a tidal wave of zombies. Slow moving but as far as the eye can see. I know I won’t be safe at home. And I don’t think we can even out run them. I pick up my boy and I start to run and that’s when I wake up.