(Male, 50’s) I had this nightmare during a nap so only bits and pieces of it are coming back to me but it’s pretty weird.
It started that my wife and I were picking up our daughter from day care — which is bizarre for several reasons one of which is that our real daughter is graduating high school, hardly the daycare age. The second bizarre thing is that our daughter looks exactly like my wife except smaller. And by smaller I mean scaled smaller like an image in photoshop: shorter, narrower. And the most bizarre thing, I think, is that she never looks us in the face. Our daughter is always facing away from us, like she’s pouting or something or maybe like she doesn’t actually *have* a face… By the time we get to the daycare, it’s getting dark and the lady at the daycare is angry, pissy. Her door is locked with multiple locks. She’s upset that we’ve left it so late again, so close to dark when the zombies come out.
Oh yeah, another bizarre part of this dream is that everything gets over run by zombies at night fall. Life goes on pretty much the same during the day but once the sun goes down and things get dark… it’s the living dead EVERYWHERE. As we’re heading away from the daycare, I say to my wife that things weren’t like this back home, that maybe we should consider going home, perhaps even that very night. She agrees immediately and we start walking “home” which was some place several hundred miles away and I *think* it was to the south of where we were. This was a popular idea. There were MANY many people also out on the streets but NONE of us were in cars. Everyone was walking. Along the side of the road people had set up impromptu rummage sales. I stopped at one that was selling nice old hardbound books. They were all reasonably priced, though I had no money, was setting out on a multi-day hike and, oh yeah, was fleeing from zombies.
That’s probably the MOST BIZARRE part of the whole dream. Everyone KNEW there were zombies around ready to strike out at any minute. By this point in the dream, there even was an occasional zombie reaching out from the shade underneath a tree to grab and devour someone. Everyone knew there were zombies but we carried on in total brain-dead denial of that horror. Here were were members of a crowd stumbling down the streets, a banquet on the hoof, absolutely NO protection yet we were just walking along, not even particularly hurrying. Part of my mind kept saying “Wake up. Wake up. There’s danger here!”