Turning lucid on the zombies

Y’all better hope I’m not prophetic. I’ve dreamt of the zombie apocalypse just about every night for a week or so now.

There’s not ever much plot. I don’t ever get any information on how it got to be this way, and the setting is usually unfamiliar. It’s just typical zombie tropes. This morning about 3 I dreamed that my companions and I were in an old warehouse on top of a small hill. It was mid-afternoon or so, and we were fortifying it as best we could for the inevitable attacks at nightfall. We had already had to kill one guy who was posing rather convincingly as a fellow survivor, until he got in and started running around looking for a place to hide until the sun went down. (Apparently in this universe, at least some of the zombies turn back superficially normal-looking in the daytime.)

Oh, and there were computer reports of some sort too. There was always a bookish woman typing on a laptop, presumably communicating with someone else. She did this even in the middle of attacks, so it must have been very important.

So what actually prompted me to write about it this morning was the interesting turn things took this time. This one guy with a big beard and a plaid shirt and I are trying to keep this monster from coming through a piece of sheet metal we’ve wedged in a door frame, and I became aware that I was dreaming. I stopped shooting. The guy looked at me and said “what the hell are you doing?” I said something close to “well, none of this is real. I’m dreaming. And it’s all very stressful, so I’m opting out now.”

And Paul Bunyan starts in on me like I’m defecting: “I can’t believe you’d quit on us, you rotten son of a bitch!” and so forth. I started laughing, he moved to shoot me, and then I woke up.

I don’t have lucid dreams often. That I can remember, it’s probably happened to me three dozen times in my life. Usually when I do, it’s either a) an artistically and/or dramatically interesting dream in which I want to see what happens, so I try to stay “stealthy”; or b) an erotic dream that I’d really like to continue as long as possible that then slips from my grasp immediately when I realize it’s a dream.

So generally I don’t take an active role like I did last night. Maybe it’ll be the end of those dreams. I would say the quality of my sleep has been consistently questionable for a couple of years now, and meeting swarms of flesh-eating undead every night can’t possibly be helpful.

photo credit: denny.weinmann Slow, But Deliberate via photopin (license)

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2 thoughts on “Turning lucid on the zombies”

  1. Ah, lucid dreams. Mine usually happen when I’ve decided to take a nap, or sometimes when I fall back asleep in the morning after Len leaves for work. Mine almost always involve my thinking either Len has come back in the house for something or a stranger has come in. Scared the hell out of me the first time it happened. I could SEE an intruder in my house but I couldn’t move a muscle. I was terrified. Once I figured out what the phenomenon was, it quit scaring me so badly, it still…. Now when it happens I start a mantra in my head that goes like, “Move your hand, move your hand, move, move, move!” Eventually, I can snap myself out of it, but it still rattles me.

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