Tag: zombies

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Nightmares

Nightmare #238 – Flesh-Eating Mutants

(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.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #235 – Junior High Undead

(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.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #233 – The Shrinking City

(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.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #231 – Zombie Skunk

(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.

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Other Haunts This Just In

This Just In: Crawling Zombie Jello Mold

zombie_torso_mold

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.

Crawling Zombie Jello Mold

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.

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"What We Fear" Halloween papercraft This Just In

This Just In – Man Bites… Man

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?

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #177 – A Town in Panic

(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.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #203 – Accident at the Alien Incinerator

(Male, 30’s) It started off as a normal dream. I was being given a walk-through tour of a place like NASA or something. A large scientific facility and this was the tour for new employees. One of the things we were shown was the incinerator. I remember seeing a small pile of ashes in front of it. We were told to be very careful in cleaning the incinerator because this was where the bodies of the alien creatures were disposed of and if the incinerator wasn’t properly cleaned, we’d risk spreading some kind of alien infection. I made a special mental note to clean the incinerator really well. At the end of the tour, I told the guide that I knew it was all business as usual for them but that I was still finding it kind of hard to get my head around the idea that aliens were real!

“…It wasn’t clear actually whether it really was an accident or whether she did it on purpose….”

So I started working there and things went fine for a few weeks. Then a woman I worked with got careless with the incinerator. It wasn’t clear actually whether it really was an accident or whether she did it on purpose but some the alien virus got out and started infecting people. They turned into some kind of zombie monster. There were strict protocols for how to deal with virus in order to keep it contained.

But some how my 9 year old son got infected. We were locked in a room together. I knew that I had to contain the infection which meant I had to kill him. But he had just started to turn so most of the time I would look at him and he’d be normal. Only every every now and then he’d act very aggressive and throw me around the room. It was impossibly hard but I realized that I’d have to kill him. I got a knife. When he saw the knife he went crazy, so I hid it behind my back. He calmed down. I approached my son and I hugged him, and as I hugged him I sawed off his head with the knife. By that point it was clear that he was a monster but still somewhere inside he was my son. He died mercifully quickly. But his head didn’t fall off entirely. So I had to sort of twist it around and saw for awhile on the other side until it separated.”

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Halloween Movies

Movies: Slick Claymation Zombies

Stop motion animation of any kind is a labor of love. Sure, computers have made some aspects slightly less tedious but the technique still involves taking hundreds of pictures and moving figures thousands of times. So even on a merely technical level this short claymation video is impressive.

But also consider the sheer quantity of gore in this clip. It would be impossible or at least highly cost prohibitive in most other kinds of video. The storyline too is fine. The same producer made earlier pieces that are much rougher.

Part One

Part Two

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #112 – Bad Shot

(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.

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Games Other Haunts

Other Haunts — Urban Dead

 

Urban Dead

From time to time, Mrs. Grimgnome is a doctor trapped inside a zombie-plagued town. She travels from building to building, in constant communication with a larger coalition of do-good-ing humans, trying to thwart the zombie menace. My dear wife, you see, is nearly addicted to a free on-line massively multi-player game called “Urban Dead.”

http://www.urbandead.com/

The game is basic, almost simplistic and easily overlooked by those thumb-twitching game-fiends who need flashy graphics to keep their attention. Since it’s web-based – and I know this isn’t unique to Urban Dead – it can be played on ANY computer that can traverse the Weird Wild Web which is refreshing in this era where games frequently require a platform upgrade. The game field is a three by three grid that represents the buildings and areas a player can see out of a relatively large city of Malton. (The Powers-That-Be prudently sealed off Malton shortly after the zombie’s started rising, y’know, to make sure things didn’t get REALLY out of hand.) Details about these areas appear in text and can be enhanced by certain objects, for instance binoculars. But only human players can use objects. Oh yes. In Urban Dead, players can also be zombies. In fact, human players turn into zombies when they are killed. And for that matter, zombies can be turned back into humans at “Revive Points”.

Since the object of the game is ongoing and so broadly construed, player groups have formed with other goals, some extremely idiosyncratic. Some are simple “neighborhood watch” type groups that keep the zombies out. There are zombie-based groups even that try to organize their destruction or give it a peculiar slant. One group, as I remember it, were scholars in life and hence they refuse to kill anyone found in a library, museum or school. A nice twist on the cliched zombie rally call “Brains!” These groups run their own websites that as far as I can see have no connection whatsoever to Kevan Davis, the guy behind Urban Dead. My wife’s group even appears to have a Firefox plugin that allows players to identify other group members in crowds as well as to track other kinds of information. They help each other, patrol their neighborhood of Malton, co-ordinate raids, heck, they might even have raves and tea-parties for all I know.

Kevan Davis keeps the site fun too with upgrades and special limited time events. For instance, on Hallowe’en for one day only, there were trick or treaters out, some wearing costumes, some knocking on heavily barricaded door for the stale candy that was available that day only from mall stores. Weird. But weirdly fun.

There is a relatively detailed WIKI for the game that can be found at:

http://wiki.urbandead.com/index.php/Main_Page

Last year for Christmas, Mrs. Grimgnome got an Urban Dead t-shirt which she loves DEARLY, wears constantly — and washes occasionally. Get one for someone you love.

http://www.cafepress.com/kevandotorg/1180110

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #86 Ressurection Virus

zombies
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.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #85 – Zombie Farm

(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.

Categories
Games Other Haunts

Creepy Fun: Zombies the Card Game

Zombies the Card Game Zombies invaded my household awhile back and occupied my family’s attentions night after night for several weeks. By “zombies” I of course mean the addictively amusing table game from Twilight Creations. I’m not enough of a game aficianado to know the correct term for this kind of game; it is card-based but also has a board that is assembled piece by piece as the game progresses. And the coolest part of the game perhaps are the plastic zombies that serve as obstacles to the players. In the expansion sets, there are even cooler variants of these zombies including glow-in-the-dark “radioactive” zombies and zombie dogs.

The object of the game should be familiar to anyone who knows a thing or two about zombies and that is, brute survival – and since only one person can fly away on that helicopter at the end (the victory condition) the side objective is making sure that other players don’t escape before you do. The theme changes nicely based on the different expansion sets, ranging from Night of the Living Dead (zombies original recipe), Dawn of the Dead (zombies in the mall), Day of the Dead (military zombies) and on to zombie dogs, college zombies and sewer zombies. Our household has got ’em all and they’re all great though the expansion sets, obviously require the original Zombies! game. One piece of advice I’d pass along is to pick up an extra “Bag o’ Zombies.” The number of zombies figures in the starter box isn’t really enough for even a middle sized game. And who wants to run out of zombies?

The artwork on the cards graphically illustrates the action of the card. In fact there are a couple cards whose illustrations are so intense that my daughter insists we take them out of play. The only drawback to the game that we’ve found is that the board sometimes ends up snaking out larger than our table, especially when adding an expansion set. The remedy that we’ve found is to push all the furniture to the edges of the room and play on the floor!

In short, Zombies! is a blast. Games without an expansion set seem to take a little over an hour which is a nice length for an evening’s entertainment — with an expansion set or two… well, don’t start one of those if you don’t want to be occupied til the wee hours. And heck, Zombies! or any table game is a great excuse to shut off the TV and actually look at the members of your household.

http://www.twilightcreationsinc.com/zombies/

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #63 – Flame-thrower and the Zombie Parade

(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.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #56 – Zombies Last Stand

(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.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #29 – Tornado Girl, Dead and Un-dead

(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.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #21 – Saviour, Monster

(Male, 40’s) For awhile I had a lot of dreams about zombies. I mean, a LOT. And they were all work-related which probably says a lot about how I viewed my job at the time.

I was in my office, which is at least a real, four-walls kind of office not a cubicle, even if it is very narrow and has no window. And an absurdly high ceiling, like at least 12 feet. I believe it used to be a storage closet because it’s got a steel door and a very secure lock. This isn’t part of the nightmare–or should I say, that’s just part of the nightmare that is my every day life. Even with my door open I can only barely hear what’s going on in the room outside, just the merest suggestions of what’s going on. I have two servers behind me that crank out a lot of heat and white noise. Again this is all my real life office and that’s pretty much exactly where the dream took place.

I’m in my office, working on my laptop when I hear the normal sounds of work in the other room stop. There’s the sound of a great rush, a great hurry. Then there’s a moment or two of quiet. I went to the door to look out. For the most part the room was abandoned, chairs knocked over, papers everywhere like folks left in a hurry. Then I heard a low moaning, a whole chorus of groaning voices. Zombies, of course. I mean, who doesn’t recognize the sound of a horde of mindless un-dead when they hear them, right? I grabbed my son who for some reason was standing in the room and pulled him into my office. I very quietly closed my door and locked it. The groaning got louder but I knew we’d be safe in this bunker of an office.

The terrifying part is what I heard next. Someone else, another human was out there. I could hear him crouching low next to the door, hiding so the zombies in the hallway couldn’t see him. He was begging me to open the door and to let him in. I hear the zombies come closer and I really, really just hoped they would kill him quickly before they realized that he was trying to get inside the door. I felt horrible. I had saved my son but I felt like a monster.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #19 – The Dogs, the Un-dead

(Male, mid-40’s) I dreamt that my partner was, well, he was dead. I didn’t realize it at first so I tried to talk with him but he kept moving toward me, slowly, very slowly. Then I got a good look at him. His skin was grey and his eyes were red. In the dream, I figured he had caught some kind of vampire thing that was going around. He kept coming and I knew I couldn’t let him catch me. I got to the staircase of our place and was going to escape downstairs. But our two dogs were down there. They were MUCH larger than in real life. They kept circling, circling at the foot of the stairs, waiting for me. I figured I’d take my chances with the dogs so I stood at the top of the stairs and took a huge leap to jump to the bottom just as my partner got to the top.
And I just hung there in space. I moved slowly, slowly like I was moving through water. I tried to grab onto the banister to pull myself along but I couldn’t reach it. I glided slowly down through the air and my undead-zombie-vampire partner was able to keep up, step by step, even moving as slowly as he was.