It was a zombie apocalypse. I don’t remember encountering a zombie in the dream, but at the point where the dream became coherent we had been running for weeks. I know that I was covered in blood and part of the dream was me washing gore away in a small stream.
And I say “we”: I was with a family – your standard, middle-American, soccer-playing family. Mom, dad, teenage daughter, ten year old son. The mom was, I think, some woman from a car commercial and I’m fairly certain the daughter was the girl from Eureka. I had found them somewhere in trouble and said that I’d help them. So we were traveling, trying to find some sort of safety.
(There were two others with our group, but I can’t picture them. They were important somehow, though.)
We had found an abandoned house in some kind of burb-clave. A gated community, and were trying to set up a temporary haven. I’m fairly certain the “epidemic” hadn’t expanded into the “resident evil” level, as there was still infrastructure: power, water, and cellular service – though, this was spotty, and that was the most important part of the dream.
Here is why I remember the dream:
We hadn’t had cell service for a while. There was a big deal where I was trying to find a power charger for my phone. The first thing I did once I had power was to call my Dad’s phone, as I hadn’t talked to them in a couple months and I was worried.
And I knew, as soon as I heard the ring on the other side, that they were dead. This huge wave of grief swept over me – and I’m talking a degree of grief I’ve not felt since Lafe died.
The phone rang four times and then the voice mail picked up, and the recording played, and that made it worse, because it was my father saying “goodbye.” I don’t remember exactly what the message said but the gist of it was: “To whoever hears this: If you are listening to this, my wife, and I are now dead. Our house is surrounded, and we have decided to end things on our terms. If this is our children: we love you”.
I don’t remember ever crying in a dream before but I did in this one. It was a horrible feeling and one I was glad to wake up from.
Jesus B, what a harsh dream. Hope tonight’s are better.
I totally thought about you when I woke up, ’cause I know you have a lot of zombie dreams. I don’t, which is why this was unusual.
Yeah, true. Sometimes I don’t even see a zombie, I just know my dreamscape and that it fuckin’ always contains them.
I’m thinking that the only reason you had Zombie Apocalypse instead of another type is ’cause of the movie last week, though. Like, if we’d watched some other society-ending flick — the sun burns out, earth’s orbit is blown, the moon goes away, asteroid/comet impact — that might have changed your dreamscape for the dream.
Hrm. Looks like I’ve been watchin’ too much Discovery channel. Again.
Yes, I think that Resident Evil laid down the backdrop. I always enjoy trying to pick apart my dreams and figure out where the individual elements come from.
Definitely RE and some Walking Dead mixed in with it.
*hug* I hate those dreams. I have zombie dreams every couple of months, sometimes more often. There’s something about the powerlessness of it all that really gets to me. That no matter what you do, they will keep coming. In the last one I had I was able to turn the tables, Shaun of the Dead style, which has staved off the dreams for a while.
btw, you were in my dream this morning. We were walking together on Laguna Honda. I was telling you all about my former life, the one before the husband and baby, the one where I was just a girl who lived in my parents house on Laguna Honda. I wanted to point out the house where I lived, but I was appalled to see that all the houses were under construction, everything was changing.
:(
But, I had to respond b/c I had a zombie dream last night; my first one! Our solution was to stay on a moving train indefinitely.