Some Dreams Are Best Left Unfulfilled

November 19, 2005

I’m not sure if it’s because I don’t sleep long enough or because my brain is just messed up… but I hardly ever remember my dreams. I know they say that even if you don’t remember them, you had them. I’m content in knowing they’re there, even I don’t remember them.

Why? Because when I do remember them, they’re always very, very odd. I had a dream a while back that I was part of some military unit that was hunting down something. Only after it had taken out the rest of my team did I see it. It was a giant, 20 foot tall Mr. T. Yeah… you heard me. Mr. T. Luckily, I’ve mastered the art of waking myself up from a dream. I learned that rare art during my childhood of nightmare after nightmare.

I remembered my dream last night. And while I didn’t wake myself up from it, I certainly could have gone without remembering.

The Dream

I was on my way to work (which was apparently in a basement somewhere) and I noticed someone getting beaten up in an alley close to my job. As soon as I got to work, I grabbed a co-worker and ran back to check it out. When we got there, the person who had been beaten was still there. But instead of being beaten… they had been eaten.

After returning to work, a special meeting was called and we were informed that a real-life Night of the Living Dead was going on and that the theatre above the basement we were in was being turned into a safe haven. We were all supplied with “top secret air guns�? (which basically looked like one of those vacuums with the long tube attached to a rolling base) and told we were going to defend the theatre. Apparently I’d used this vacuum gun before, because I automatically knew how to use it.

When we made our way up into the theatre, it was already starting to fill up with people trying to escape the zombies. Occasionally, people who had been bitten before they arrived would turn and we’d have to take them out with our vacuum guns. I spent what seemed like hours in the theatre before finally convincing my boss that I needed to go home to protect my family. She let me leave… but not with the vacuum gun.

When I got home, I discovered that I was living at the house I lived in back in Texas. There was a park in this neighborhood and it, like the theatre, was filling up with people. Since my family was no where to be found, I started mingling in the crowd to see if I could find them. I ran into a friend of mine who lived two doors down from me and he was doing the same thing. We teamed up to search and were later informed that both of our families had been airlifted to a “secured location�?. Someone must have been important. But we were stranded. So we decided to hunker down in his garage and hold out until we could be picked up too.

If you thought it was odd so far… just wait. The really weird part is just beginning.

A group of zombies started making their way up the driveway into the garage we were fortifying. Since neither of us had a vacuum gun, we grabbed the closest weapon-like objects and took to them. I had a shovel… my friend had a pick axe. It was gory and bloody… but we beat the crap out of those zombies. And we left them in the driveway… almost as a warning to others to stay away.

We went back to building up our defenses and pretty much ignored the chaos that was going on out in the park. All of the sudden, I had a tap on my shoulder. It was one of the zombies that I’d hacked into on the driveway. He was about my age but didn’t resemble anyone I actually knew. And he was completely regenerated or something… it didn’t look like I’d done anything to him. This time I grabbed an actual axe, and removed his head. I know… gross. The whole dream was. Haha.

After more time had passed, we both noticed it had gone quiet in the park. We grabbed a couple of weapons and made our way around the house to check the park out. It was empty, save for a few zombie corpses laying around. Oh… yeah… and one other thing: that damn kid I’d already hacked on twice before. He was back… and laughing at me. My friend told me he had to get ready to go camping (don’t ask me why he was camping when zombies were running amuck… it’s a dream… remember). He went into his house and left me with the zombie who wouldn’t die.

As I started attacking the kid zombie again, he continued to laugh and tell me that no matter how many times I killed him, he’d keep coming back. Which of course… he did. Except this time, he wasn’t completely human. His arms and legs were robotic, but his torso and head were human. Suddenly it all made sense (remember… dream). He was a cyborg of some kind - part human, part robot. The human part of him had been bitten and it was the robotic part that made him keep regenerating.

This time… I chopped him into pieces and threw the parts into opposite corners of the park. My friend reappeared about this time and said I needed to hurry if I was going to go with him (so he wasn’t the only one stupid enough to camp on a night like this). I went home… packed… and started walking back over to his house. On the way, I ran into the 30 year old foreign exchange student who lived with my friend. He was checking the mail and had been inside all night. He knew nothing of what was going on, so I stopped to fill him in. He didn’t seem to care.

And then… I woke up.

The Analysis

While I’m no dream analyst, I usually do try to figure out what in the world a strange dream means. The normal dreams are usually easy. But this one took a little work. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far. The first couple are literal interpretations; that is to say that I think I know where they came from. The remaining few are more ethereal interpretations of what I think these elements represent:

1. The Basement/Theatre: I’ve always thought basements and theatres were creepy. I guess they got thrown in for effect when my brain was spinning this lovely story.
2. Me being all military-like: I bought Call of Duty 2 for my GameCube a couple of days ago and have been playing it non-stop. This is the only thing I can think of that would have caused my mind to make me militaryesqe.
3. My old house/friend: This friend was the last person I talked to last night. We had been playing phone tag all day yesterday, so I assume he was on my mind subconsciously. We actually used to spend a lot of time in his garage for one reason or another. It had a covered walkway into the house, so we’d go from the inside to the outside by way of the garage. And we used to play baseball in the park.
4. The zombies: The zombies represent consumption, but not in as literal a sense as they did in the dream. I think my mind is trying to telling me that something is consuming me in the mental sense. All of the zombies want a piece of me, yet I was fighting them all away. So I think they represent something I’m not dealing with.
5. The zombie who wouldn’t die: This particular zombie was supposed to be me, I think. He didn’t look like me. But he was my age and he was fixated on getting to me. He ignored every other person who was there for the eating and focused all of his energy on me. Like the other issues represented by the other zombies, I kept fighting him off. But this particular zombie/issue isn’t going to go away. It will keep coming back over and over again… getting stronger and more clear each time. I’m not sure what exactly he represents… but I think I’ll eventually figure out what it is (just like in the dream when he returned as a cyborg and I “figured him out�?).
6. The foreign exchange student: I have no idea what this guy represents… but I included him because every single time I have a dream about this friend of mine… this exact same foreign exchange student is living with him. Seriously. I’ve had dreams about my friend before… and he always has the exact same foreign guy living with him who’s too old to actually be a student. So the best I can come up with is that the foreign exchange student represents some aspect of either my friend or my relationship with this friend. Something foreign, maybe? Something I have yet to understand or figure out… just like having a hard time understanding someone who’s foreign? That’s the best I can come up with. But I had to include him since he’s a recurring aspect of my dream world.

As I said before, I’m usually content with not remembering my dreams. I have a feeling they’re all just a little bit out there. But this one was not only extremely vivid, but it was also very easy for me to recall. I’m wondering if I might have had this dream before and just not remembered it… until now. With each passing version, things get a little more detailed and a little less easy for me to not remember. I’ll have to wait and see if it recurs again.

But the best part of the whole thing was this: I kicked major ass with that axe. Haha.

Posted in Dreams, Personal

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