Dreams

I am sorry for the long break there for a while. This was mostly due to being busy, but partly due to being lazy and partly due to spending too much time reading comics on the internet instead of writing. The truth is, I also had this great idea, and it was taking some time. Okay, the idea may not be that great, but I thought so at the time. It basically consists of me keeping a dream diary, and then sharing some of my dreams with you all! This thought struck me after a pretty ridiculous dream a while ago, and I was hoping for some extra material. Anyway, if you are nervous about delving into the inner workings of my subconscious, I suggest you skip this post. If you happen to be a professional or amateur dream interpreter, I would love to know what on earth my dreams could possibly mean.

Because of the nature of dreams (at least mine), I don't have complete stories to tell, but rather a couple of snippets and scenes that I've dreamed in the past several weeks.

Dream 1: Wolves Take Over the World

I woke up in a mall, not one I know. It was crowded, but without the usual rush and stampede of a mall on Christmas Eve. Rather, I had the impression that everyone had been there for quite some time, and they were in fact very comfortable together and being there.

As I was in a dream, and in dreams you understand a great deal without knowing how, I knew that the people I saw hadn't just been in the mall for a morning or afternoon, but rather for days, likely weeks. I also knew that it was only a matter of time before we were all in very real and terrible danger. I had the feeling that I was being watched, and the clock was ticking.

I must have spoken with some of the people in the mall, although the conversations are fuzzy now, because I understood later what had happened, and the reason for our predicament. It had been sudden, and devastating. The appearance of massive, intelligent, vicious, and incredibly numerous wolves with a taste for human flesh had taken the world by surprise. Some lucky few had managed to board up the mall and had been living there for the past several weeks. Many others had been devoured. The people in the mall seemed alright with their predicament, waiting for help that had yet to come, and I suspected would never come. You see, I knew that it wasn't just in our corner of the world that the people had become the hunted, it was everywhere.

I decided immediately that we needed a plan, something better than just waiting. We needed to prepare ourselves, to escape this death trap waiting to happen. After all, the food wouldn't last forever, and intelligent wolves, even without opposable thumbs, are a formidable enemy.

I began searching the mall, sick of the people there who were content waiting for death, waiting for something. It wasn't long before I found a supply store. It may have been an REI or an LL Bean, but anyway it had tents, sleeping bags, cook sets, everything necessary for camping and surviving, including some large knives.

There was someone else outside the store, a man who seemed as uncomfortable as I was about the whole situation. I was relieved to finally find someone else keen on escaping this mall. Unfortunately I had only just arrived, without the chance of making acquaintances, when the crash of broken glass made me jump and listen carefully. More crashes and screams followed. The wolves had broken in at last.

I ran to the balcony since I was on the second floor in a deserted corner. A huge wolf looked up at me from the ground floor where he had just broken in. Out of the corner of my eye I saw people running in the middle of the mall. A horde of wolves, as tall as I am at the shoulder, pursued them, their growls low and ominous. I backed up a few steps, but right then the wolf below me leaped.

If you were laughing before at the thought of wolves halting all of society, imagine now a wolf at least five feet high leaping a full story over a barrier onto the second floor of a mall with ease, jaws open, white teeth gleaming, tongue lolling. His eyes were intelligent and cold.

I didn't have time to react, but I still had a long knife from the store in my hand. The wolf struck and I dodged slightly and struck with the knife as jaws snapped right next to my head. We were knocked to the floor and grappled. I could feel claws raking my arms and legs, but I stabbed down again and again, holding onto my knife.

Suddenly, stillness. And then, the wolf tangled with my limbs and knife was gone. Just like that, poof. If I had had any doubts before about some bizarre magics making all this possible, the sudden disappearance of the wolf culled them. But I had discovered something valuable: the wolves could be killed.

We had only moments before the rest of the wolf pack would make it's way to our side of the mall, and implicitly I knew the man near the store and I were now a team. He pulled me up and we grabbed backpacks, stuffing them with whatever supplies were close on hand, before hoisting them on our shoulders and setting off. Later I realized the man was Brian and we had always known each other, although before we had never met. Dreams are weird like that.

The rest of the dream was fragmented. We made it out of the mall and traveled quite some ways under cover. Although I don't recall the time passing, when we next made contact with another group of people in a small town, the wolves had been destroying society and killing people indiscriminately for months. The people of the town had retained a car or two and pooled their gasoline, and they managed to keep one warehouse wolf-free. People had either learned how to defend themselves or been killed. We were chased more than once, and in the town we had to flee in a car from another hungry pack, but we survived.

Dream 2: Mel is Chased by the Authorities and Zombies

It was perpetual dusk. I was in a city of sorts, but one run down and nearly entirely abandoned. I was in a warehouse district, and I was running. The authorities were after me. They wanted something I had, and had set me up.

An outbreak had occurred not too long before, not unlike that in 28 Days Later if you've seen that movie, or in The Walking Dead if you've read that comic. That is to say, people were turning into zombies, then hunting for flesh and victims. Luckily in this dream, the zombies could only move at a shuffling walk, so it was easy to outrun them. On the other hand, when there were dozens of them surrounding you, evading them still proved difficult.

Like I said, I was running. I was running from zombies, and I was running from the authorities, who managed to have a few of the remaining functioning cars and whose only goal was to capture me.

You see, I had the antidote. I don't recall how I got it, but I had it. For some reason, the authorities were under the impression that I had stolen it or was going to destroy it (why, I don't know) and so they wanted to eliminate me as fast as possible. Unfortunately, the antidote was pretty fragile and I was worried that in any conflict it would be destroyed. I also didn't want to be eliminated.

So, I ran.

This involved a considerable amount of hiding in abandoned grey buildings. I tried to get the help of some friends, but I didn't want to get them in trouble with the authorities, and most of them had already been contacted.

There is a big fuzzy part of the dream I don't remember, but somehow I finally got in touch with someone in charge and managed to convince them that I just wanted the antidote used, and hadn't stolen it. As it was fragile and unstable, and the zombie-people were closing in everywhere, we hastily had to throw something together.

The solution: antidote grenades. For some reason they emitted a yellow-green smoke that made all the zombie-people in the area snap back to normal.

In the final scene I remember, the zombies were closing in and we were hastily trying to prepare the antidote and only had a couple of grenades ready. We launched them into the shambling crowd of zombies coming towards us, trapping us in a corner of an old warehouse.

Then I woke up.

Dream 3: Crazy Man Plans Assassination and Suicide With Coerced Help

This dream was way too messed up and terrifying for my liking, so I promptly purged most of it from my memory. However, the gist was that a man not unlike the Joker (from the latest Batman), who was psychologically ill and terrifying, planned on assassinating someone at a big event, then committing suicide. He needed help getting in the building and setting up things, so he blackmailed and threatened me (and others) into helping him.

I mostly remember one scene where we were in a public bathroom and one of the guys who was supposed to be helping tried to convince the crazy joker man to not to do it. Joker (since he didn't have a name in the dream, I'll call him that) stuffed the other man in one of the stalls and shot him while we all watched, then promptly continued to give us instructions.

The dream skipped forward a bunch and I don't recall much, but at the end we were in that same bathroom and the crazy man was threatening to kill himself with the pistol he'd been carrying all dream, and I was begging him not to. I think I covered my face and there was a shot and then I woke up.

Most of my dreams aren't nearly as terrifying as that last one, but for some reason I do get chased a lot in my dreams. Most of them are also incredibly vivid and bizarre. I don't know what's up with my subconscious that way.

Aside: Some of my past dreams have included aliens, spaceships, escaping from swamps with alligators, making myself super large and shrinking really small by pushing my belly button, getting kidnapped by the Phantom of the Opera, who later turned out to be someone wearing a Scream mask, battling cows with Mad Cow Disease at my old elementary school using catapults, flying, and turning into a green glass monster that shattered. So if you think these dreams were exceedingly bizarre or random, they are more or less on par with my regular nighttime excursions.

I'll possibly keep you posted on any more super exciting dreams I have, but I think I might be done with this experiment for now. Later, back to my real life!

PS: Okay so I was going to post this yesterday but I'm glad I didn't because last night I had this ridiculous dream where I was in a hospital trying to take care of this woman who had lost her baby. I was in Africa and the woman was refused care at three hospitals before we found one that would take her. Anyway I kept arguing with doctors and nurses and trying to see the woman and they wouldn't let me until the very end of the dream. In the end she was okay though. That was possibly the most normal dream I've had in a while, and I blame it entirely on reading the New York Times Health Section daily...



 UPDATE 7-5-11

Last night I dreamed I was in the Hunger Games. If you've read the book, that's already terrifying. If you haven't, imagine something like the Roman Gladiatorial games, only in an area the size of Delaware, and lasting for weeks, and the last person standing wins. Anyway everyone started on the water, in boats, with two assistants who were there to guide you for the first couple of days. Then the killing would start. One of my friends from high school was also in the competition. I was in luck since I know about sailing, but people tried to rob me right off the bat since I had one of the better boats, and then I couldn't bring myself to kill anyone. I knocked a couple of people out, and didn't get hurt. Thankfully the dream ended before the inevitable bloodbath and potential murdering of friends. When I woke up, I wondered why no one in the actual Hunger Games committed suicide, because the fear of death seems a lot worse than death itself.