The Zombie Dream
Oct. 4th, 2009 05:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinMy dreams tend to fall in three categories: completely bizarre, erotic, and The Zombie Dream. The Zombie Dream is rarely actually about zombies in particular. It's about being chased/besieged by an unstoppable, implacable horde of something. I'm sure it's a recurring theme in the human subconscious, which is one reason why zombie movies are so popular... and zombie movies being so popular means that they will be a popular image for the brain to tack onto these things.
I had an example of The Zombie Dream today. It seems like I have the most interesting dreams when I end up sleeping for a long period during the day, which I did today. The dream was that I was with a group of people--not actual people I actually know, just dream actors--on a vacation up in the mountains, and we stopped on a hike to investigate the ruins of an old (stage type, not screen type) theater in the middle of a ghost town. One of the guys got some blue-green goop in his hair poking around in a dark corner. He couldn't get it off... it stuck to his hand when he tried to wipe it off, and to his girlfriend's hand, as well, when she tried. He laughed about it, but she found it unnerving.
Then the goop started to spread up their arms and down his head, and other people got goop on them as we realized that there was a lot of dried, crusted stuff all over inside the theater and it was starting to soften up and "wake up". Other people in the group got goop on them, and we were forced to retreat deeper back inside the building instead of running out as it cut off our escape. We realized that as goop got onto people, it started to eat inwards, though it numbed them so they couldn't tell. When it got to the brain (as it did fairly quickly with the first guy to get contaminated), it could take control of them. It would eventually (or very quickly, when somebody fell right into a big patch/pile of it) absorb somebody completely, at which point parts of the goop could reshape itself into copies of them. The whole thing was one big organism, so parts that were unconnected could benefit from things that other parts had learned.
And it was definitely intelligent. As it got mouths, it talked to us and taunted us, and tried to trick us. We ended finding caves that connected to the back of the theater, which were even thicker with the goop and were where it had originally gotten into the town. By this point there were very few of us left, and the goop had lots of controlled and created bodies. Eventually the few survivors (myself and two other people) found ourselves trapped between a cavern with a giant pulsating main body of the stuff and the horde that had been chasing us. We figured out that we could, as they say dans la belle internet, Kill It With Fire... something we'd tried early on but it turned out the stuff didn't catch fire very easily. But using a blowtorch we were able to get part of the big mass burning, which then started to spread. It burned very quickly, leaving behind an ashy path we could run through. The connection it shared with other parts of itself meant that they were all disrupted by the pain, losing speed and coordination, but still chasing us. We had to run through the gap that had been burned to get to an underground river, which we used to escape from the caves and the gunk.
When we got out, we called the governor (another person from the casting department, but she was definitely the governor) and begged her to get the army to firebomb the town, but instead they sent in a team to capture samples to be studied byTop Men. Top... Men the government.
I had an example of The Zombie Dream today. It seems like I have the most interesting dreams when I end up sleeping for a long period during the day, which I did today. The dream was that I was with a group of people--not actual people I actually know, just dream actors--on a vacation up in the mountains, and we stopped on a hike to investigate the ruins of an old (stage type, not screen type) theater in the middle of a ghost town. One of the guys got some blue-green goop in his hair poking around in a dark corner. He couldn't get it off... it stuck to his hand when he tried to wipe it off, and to his girlfriend's hand, as well, when she tried. He laughed about it, but she found it unnerving.
Then the goop started to spread up their arms and down his head, and other people got goop on them as we realized that there was a lot of dried, crusted stuff all over inside the theater and it was starting to soften up and "wake up". Other people in the group got goop on them, and we were forced to retreat deeper back inside the building instead of running out as it cut off our escape. We realized that as goop got onto people, it started to eat inwards, though it numbed them so they couldn't tell. When it got to the brain (as it did fairly quickly with the first guy to get contaminated), it could take control of them. It would eventually (or very quickly, when somebody fell right into a big patch/pile of it) absorb somebody completely, at which point parts of the goop could reshape itself into copies of them. The whole thing was one big organism, so parts that were unconnected could benefit from things that other parts had learned.
And it was definitely intelligent. As it got mouths, it talked to us and taunted us, and tried to trick us. We ended finding caves that connected to the back of the theater, which were even thicker with the goop and were where it had originally gotten into the town. By this point there were very few of us left, and the goop had lots of controlled and created bodies. Eventually the few survivors (myself and two other people) found ourselves trapped between a cavern with a giant pulsating main body of the stuff and the horde that had been chasing us. We figured out that we could, as they say dans la belle internet, Kill It With Fire... something we'd tried early on but it turned out the stuff didn't catch fire very easily. But using a blowtorch we were able to get part of the big mass burning, which then started to spread. It burned very quickly, leaving behind an ashy path we could run through. The connection it shared with other parts of itself meant that they were all disrupted by the pain, losing speed and coordination, but still chasing us. We had to run through the gap that had been burned to get to an underground river, which we used to escape from the caves and the gunk.
When we got out, we called the governor (another person from the casting department, but she was definitely the governor) and begged her to get the army to firebomb the town, but instead they sent in a team to capture samples to be studied by
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no subject
on 2009-10-04 11:14 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-10-05 04:30 am (UTC)Anyway, I don't want to nag, but it's been a while since last story update...
no subject
on 2009-10-05 12:04 pm (UTC)You could probably find a way to make the Blob a morally-ambiguous sympathetic villain, too, but I don't think zombie-esque stories are supposed to have that aspect.
no subject
on 2009-10-05 03:01 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-10-06 01:56 am (UTC)no subject
on 2009-10-06 12:43 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-10-09 08:59 pm (UTC)I'm afraid it's more likely that the immediate inspiration is that stupid Evolution movie, since I was talking about Ivan Reitman's rather uneven career before I went to bed.
tech issue
on 2009-10-06 01:03 pm (UTC)Just thought you'd want to know that when I tried accessing www.alexandraerin.com Monday (and Tuesday), I get the following error:
Site Temporarily Unavailable
We apologize for the inconvenience. Please contact the webmaster/ tech support immediately to have them rectify this.
error id: "bad_httpd_conf"
Re: tech issue
on 2009-10-07 03:56 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-10-06 02:12 pm (UTC)Anyway everything was kinda grey and there where other people and there was this super computer that was helping us get to the moon, but perhaps I only thought it was the moon because everything was grey. Then suddenly we are on the moon and there where dogs there to help us and I was like wait... how can dogs survive in vacuum and isn't it too cold for them anyway? Thats when I woke up.
By the way I finished Fallout 3 with a karma rating of messiah, mostly because I was lazy and you have to actively work at being bad in that game.
no subject
on 2009-10-07 11:13 pm (UTC)I have these dreams, too. The most interesting variant of it happened recently, where Mindflayer-esque creatures were pouring out of some basement door and going after the people trapped on the large mansion/estate above. Hat an interesting bit where I was held at knifepoint by another guy who arrived late and was too much of an ass/freaked out to think that "we need to get running now" was a good argument.