Um?

And the crazy zombie nightmares continue. Nightmares about zombies are not new to me-- I've had them pretty regularly since my second year of college. Ordinarily, I have about one nightmare or so per month. They've become more frequent of late-- I've had about four in the past month. The most recent two were not quite as lighthearted as this one.

Last week, I had a dream that I was still living in my old house in the city-- I was twelve again, my brother was still tiny and wiry, my sister was still in diapers. Sentient zombies had taken over my neighborhood. The government was trying to get in supplies, so my stepfather went to meet the supply truck, but just as he did, five of those zombies showed up on our front steps. My mother guarded the front door, and I stood by the back door with a baseball bat, because I knew that Adrian would be coming up the back alley when he came back. And he did-- but he was being chased by a 28 Days Later-style zombie. I see him coming down the alley, and at that moment, I hear the basement doorknob start to jiggle.

I was always terrified of our basement-- it had weird, uneven dirt floors, and I knew it would be fairly easy to break in through the basement window. You see, there was a local criminal who'd lived in our house before we moved in. He'd hollowed out a section of the wall and created a false brick wall. Well, about six months after we'd moved in, when I was a toddler, my parents came home one night to find that everything they owned was gone. They called the police. The police discovered the hollow wall, and there was trash, food, pillows and blankets strewn about in the little dirt pit behind it. Someone had been living in our basement. In the walls. If that's not creepy, I don't know what is. At any rate, I was describing this dream to my brother yesterday when he acknowledged the incredible creepiness of that basesment-- we never went down there unless "it was a whole family outing."

So, back to the dream. Adrian bursts through the back door, the zombie fast on his tail. He just barely clears me before the zombie bursts in, too. There I am-- twelve and terrified, frozen with a baseball bat. Then I remembered that I was always quite good in Little League, and I cocked my bat back to swing. And woke up.

I was so terrified that I thought I was going to have a heart attack-- I very nearly called Skyler because I was just that freaked out. Something about these zombies was creepier than most-- they had a sentient gleam of malevolence in their eyes. It's was infinitely worse than just your average hungry, 'roid raging zombies.

Last night's dream was different. It featured some of my friends-- Heather, Ashley, Ariel, Alex, Skyler. We were on a trip to some city I'd never been to-- part of me thinks somewhere in England. We were renting a condo that became our barricaded fortress when zombies attacked. We started taking in refugees. One of these refugees was just a little unstable, and I felt like I had to watch him very closely.

So, we made a plan-- there was some kind of factory next door to our condo, and there were empty moving vans in it, on the second floor, which, unless you could run fast enough around the ramps, was only accessible via a rickety wooden freight elevator. The plan was to use one of those vans to get to a train, and then go out to the countryside where presumably, the zombies hadn't yet spread.

That's all fine and dandy, except that before we were ready to go, the really unstable guy broke one of the skylights and knocked out the front doors. He tried to set the house on fire for some reason that I'm not really sure that I understand. He thought it would create a diversion, or something.

So, there are thirty or so of us, scrambling to get to safety as zombies are rushing in the house. I think we lost about ten people immediately, and I had the sinking feeling that I wasn't going to make it, as I had to make it down a flight of stairs, out the front door, and over to the freight elevator while going through a massive crowd of flesh-eating zombies.

Then I had a thought. Why don't I just pretend to be a zombie? If I don't act like prey, maybe I won't be seen as prey. It worked in Shaun of the Dead, didn't it?

And that's what I did. I got to the freight elevator, running the last leg and being chased. The doors closed just as I got my leg in. To my relief, Skyler was already there, but I didn't see who else had made it until we were in the back of the van. Ashley made it, Heather made it, Alex made it, but I think he got bitten, and Ariel, I'm sorry, but you didn't make it. It really upset me.

At any rate, we took the van to the countryside, where, for some weird reason, Skyler's mom had an organic farm. We all stayed there until the zombies starved out and died.

I think I actually did wake Sky up last night to tell him that I had another zombie dream, but this time we lived!

I think what's the most interesting to me is that each of my zombie dreams lately has been very different. When I started having them, they were all very much the same-- same sequence of events, nearly all the same outcome:

Usually, we start in my college freshman psych class. I'm sitting there, and Heather is next to me, and suddenly there are zombies all over the place, smashing into the glass windows, trying to get in. We get word that the government has set up a quarantine around the college perimeter, so all of the students are trapped in unless they can get to safety, because the feds sure as hell aren't coming in to help.

In the dreams, I usually lead the class out of the classroom, and then from building to building as we hurry to get to the fed line. We crawl through ceilings to get from one end of the building to the other, we dash across the open spaces as quickly as we can.

We finally get to the parking lot (the parking lot outside my college apartment, directly on the other side of campus as the psych building) where the feds have set up the dividing line, but there's a horde of scary running zombies coming our way. Generally, as the leader of the group, I take off in their direction as a diversion, allowing everyone else to get to the line, and to safety. I generally die.

Every once in awhile, I make it to my building and into the main stairwell before they catch up to me. My apartment was two-floors, and there's a balcony where I can get to the roof if I have to. I get to my room, but there are really thin walls and I can hear the zombies trying to smash through the walls to get to me. If I get this far in the dream, I crawl out to the balcony and onto the roof, where I am airlifted off to safety, then kept in quarantine until they determine I'm not a zombie.

I would love to hear what a dream analyst would have to say about these reoccurrent nightmares, about what zombies represent to my dream-consciousness. Also, why have the dreams have shifted from a standard template to a different dream each time? And why do I never dream myself an AK-47?