Zombie Dreams

One of the best things about going to the gym on the regular is I sleep more deeply, and do a better job of remembering my dreams.

Last night, I dreamed about zombies.

It was very long, almost a collection of inter-related dreams. They could have been eps in a series. And it was very, very bleak, more reminiscent of THE ROAD than say, the DAWN OF THE DEAD remake. They were slowish zombies, but not as slow as Romero's. And they were smart, like in RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD... basically the zombified people were their normal selves, except they'd turned evil, and only wanted to eat human flesh. It was way creepier than normal dumb zombies - they were almost like body snatchers, in a sense.

Anyway, it started out at my grandmother's house. When I was growing up, she lived on the same block. The zombies got in, and a massacre ensued. I was upstairs for some reason, and I realized the zombies yet know didn't know I was there. As quietly as possible, I slipped out the window, dropped to the ground, and went to the house I grew up in.

The doors were unlocked. For a few super-tense minutes, I tried to barricade the house without letting anyone outside notice I was there. (It was a lot of quietly pushing furniture against doors, etc.) The whole time, there are sirens in the distance, cop cars screaming past, people getting pulled out of the houses by zombie mobs, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.

I get a big shock when I find a boy hiding in a closet upstairs. He's maybe ten or eleven, and the source of the unlocked door. (How he had a key, I don't know - it's a dream). So now I've got to protect this kid while saving my own ass.

The zombies start poking around my house. The kid and I hold our breaths. The zombies try the the doors. Locked. They try to push open the doors. No dice... but the furniture in the way lets them know someone's inside (doh!), effectively causing my attempts to defend the place to backfire.

The zombies mount a full on assault on the back of the house. Luckily, they're of relatively normal intelligence, but death has blurred the edges for them. They've become very single-minded, so I'm able to smuggle me and the kid out through the front of the house while they're kicking in the back windows.

We have a long, scary chase of us running down the street, hoping the main mob will be distracted by searching my old house for me long enough for us to escape, all the while crossing our fingers that the zombies attacking the other houses don't notice us.

We get several blocks down before the zombies realize they were played. They come howling after us, alerting the other zombies, who join in.

We reach the first empty-looking house we can find. It's a big, rambling place that strongly resembles (but actually isn't) a house I had in Chicago right before I moved to LA. I forget how, but, in the dining room, we find a trap door under a Persian rug. It leads down to a cobwebbed basement. Fuck it - down we go. I pull the rug back, and hope the zombies don't trip over it (revealing the trap door).

In the basement, we find the owner of the house, a creepy dude who looked kinda like Eric Wareheim and acted like Tim Robbins in WAR OF THE WORLDS.

The zombies storm the house. They're calling my name, busting up the place looking for me. The weirdo keeps getting worried and about to make some noise and, like Tom Cruise in WAR, I'm wondering if I'm gonna have to kill this dude in order to save me and the kid from a zombie munch.

Then I woke up and went to the gym.