Last night I had a zombie apocalypse nightmare, albeit more of a Robert Heinlein style "slug" zombie than a traditional zombie. That is, these zombies were caused by a brain-eating parasite that resembled a mouse-sized slug and drilled into your brain, not by some sort of virus that was spread by biting.
The first we see of the zombies is the hero and heroine are in a hotel conference room and suddenly black oozy mouse-sized things burst in through the doors, along with shambling zombies. The hero pulls out a pistol and shoots a path through the zombies to the emergency exit, with the heroine covering his back with another pistol and rushing out behind him.
From that point on, things got a little less cohesive. You see slugs oozing toward them as they run to their cars in the parking lot. The hero and heroine spend a few lines trying to figure out what's happening and what they're going to do, but spot the slugs and jump into their respective cars just in time for the slugs to start slapping against the windows, and they drive off in different directions.
The heroine is in a *very* crowded Mini Cooper pulling one of those small "mini-car" teardrop trailers. Apparently she's been on the road for a long time. She drives a ways, finds a secluded spot, pulls off, and sleeps an hour or so. After that she heads to the rural area where she grew up, thinking perhaps there's more of a chance they're not infected yet, especially since everybody is well armed out there. She pulls into the driveway of the property she owns, and notices a dead body hanging out the door and leaves in a hurry. Rather than taking the main road, she takes a back road that leads to one of her relatives' homes. She passes a Sheriff's car sprawled across half the road, red lights still blinking, windshield smashed in, she can't tell where the deputy is, so she just speeds past. Finally she arrives at her relative's house, and the relative lets her in. The relative then tells her that a slug is eating into his brain, and she has only a minute or two to grab his deer rifle and blow his head off before the slug takes over and tries to kill her. She does that, and the spattered slug writhes a bit then dies.
She stocks up quickly on more guns and ammo, as well as filling her car from fuel cans, and heads toward the nearest city. She isn't breaking any laws but a patrol car comes up behind her with its bubble lights flashing. Remembering the Sheriff's Department car and the possibility that these might be zombies like her cousin that she had to kill, she keeps going until there is a second patrol car coming towards her with bubbles flashing. At that point she figures zombies don't coordinate well enough for that and pulls over.
So of course they pull her out of the car and roust her and she tries to explain what she has seen, including the slug in her cousin's brain (though in her version of the story the cousin pulled the trigger himself to commit suicide). They don't believe her.
And then I woke up.
What do penguins dream when penguins dream? Well, now you know. Nope, no idea how this story ends :).
-- Badtux the Nightmare Penguin
The key to dream interpretation is to figure out what psychological factors in your subconscious sparked that imagery. Your brain is trying to tell you something.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that you recall the dream images well enough that they're present in your waking mind, instead of being erased like "flash memory" in the computer, is an indicator that they're important to you. There's usually an emotional component to these memorable dream images. When you look at the neuro-psychological brain pathways of how memory is stored, the emotional connection through the limbic system might be why those images stay with you upon waking, rather than disappearing.
Only you can glom what these things mean, because only you know what's bugging you. I take it you've got worries about your job, your housing, whether you'll have to move to a different city... But why a female character? Who does the relative represent?
The slugs that are everywhere, eating into brains -- what do you think they mean? You focus a lot on political foolishness. Is that what the slugs are, stupid ideas, or is it job-related with stupid project details that you're working on? You don't like police, so is that why they represent a threat in the dream, or are they a sign of fear of authority figures like bosses or people you're interviewing with?
Too bad you don't get stoned. You could fire up a bowl, kick back and get in touch with your emotional side, ruminate on the deeper meanings. Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream...
Dreaming about r wing rethugs? Lol
ReplyDeleteSounds like you had some bad eggs..
ReplyDeleteWow. My dreams are never that coherent. Still. it's like Heinlein meets Steven King.
ReplyDeleteGood for King. Bad for Heinlein.
Alas,
JzB
Bukko -- sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. EBM had something on her web site a few days back about how the zombie apocalypse would be short-lived, due to all the armed Americans with brains and the fact that zombies have no brains, and this was my subconscious trying to prove her wrong. The female character undoubtedly is EBM or a semblance thereof, I haven't the foggiest notion what she drives but my subconscious put her into a sporty quick-handling little car for some reason. The house with the body hanging out is my house in Louisiana, and the relative whose brain (and slug) she blows out is a relative of mine who is my property manager and it's his fundamental decency that allows him to overcome the slug in his brain long enough to let her do it. The Sheriff's deputy whose car is on the road is the neighbor down the road from my property, so it's more a case of Officer Friendly suddenly morphing into a brain-eating zombie than anything symbolic.
ReplyDeleteIn short, if there's any symbolism, it would be that my property in Louisiana isn't going to be that good a refuge if bad shit goes down.
Nunya, or dreaming about average Americans, who might as well have slugs for brains when it comes to basic thinking skills...
Tim, I don't eat eggs. Too much like cannibalism. :)
Jazz, more like Hitchcock's The Birds meets Heinlein meets Steven King. The slugs swarm like the birds in Hitchcock's movie, they can sort of flatten themselves out and fly-glide for short distances. And as far as the dream being coherent, it wasn't really *that* coherent, just my transcription is (mostly) coherent. For example, one second she's sleeping in the Mini off the side of the road, the next she's pulling into the driveway of my house in Louisiana, with no clue how she got from point A to point B...
- Badtux the Imaginative Penguin
The female character undoubtedly is EBM or a semblance thereof, I haven't the foggiest notion what she drives but my subconscious put her into a sporty quick-handling little car for some reason.
ReplyDeleteThat would make sense because she's into the airplane thing, so the streamlined trailer fits that imagery.
As for owning a distant house, I had a fully paid-for cabin with 165 feet of shoreline on Lake Superior during the 1980s-early 90s. Crappy structure, not much better than a tar-paper shack, but stunningly gorgeous setting with a nice-sized block of land. Much of that time I was working for newspapers in other states, as far away as Florida. I used to have dreams about needing to get back to it because something was wrong. In the dreams, the theme was usually on the lines of getting bogged down and being unable to reach it, while things were going wrong. I had a few crappy tenants, so that was my subconscious worry.
I can tell you how the dream ends. The zombies take you and the woman to court and win a huge settlement.
ReplyDelete