nightmare

My dream starts off with myself and two guys running around in what appears to be a whole set of underground mazes. We each have a bunch of things that we're carrying, though most of it seems to be contained in the knapsacks we're each wearing. On top of this, however, we each have a knife strapped to the outer part of our thighs, as well as a gun in our hands. I carry what simply appears to be a pistol, while my companions have what seem to be much more military grade weapons. The tunnels we're in seem to be very dark, though we appear to know what route we're taking, but we're constantly looking behind us due to low moans and grunts that echo through the stone walls.

We eventually come to an area of tunnel where there is actually an opening in the ceiling above us and for some reason this room is lit up. This is the place we're looking for and I drop my things and get sent up first. Once I'm up my first male friend starts passing me his equipment before I haul him up, and we start doing the same for the second guy. However, the second dude is taking what seems forever to send his stuff up to so I remember remarking how 'You need to stop sending your shit up to me one at a time.' Just as I'm telling him this a loud noise echoes almost right beside us and the third of our group pales, looks down the path we came from, and looks briefly at us before running down the tunnel saying, "Guys, I'm sorry." He starts making a lot of noise as he goes, looking to draw the zombies away from where we are. It doesn't take long before it seems they catch up to him when he starts screaming and wet noises fill the tunnel. It's past time being able to save him.

We scoop up all of our belongings and exit the room into what seems to be just a normal (albeit larger) home. We walk through the kitchen and living room before exiting the house and it turns out that it's built on a beach. Walking out from the home has us standing almost at water's edge and there is an entire community of people living here: there are people sun tanning by the water, kids swimming in it, and it's just an entirely laid-back atmosphere. A couple of older men approach us to welcome us to their home and take most of our inventory besides our knives to a communal armory. Some other people encourage us to go enjoy ourselves, so we shrug and decide to go find stuff to do. I decide to go swimming so run up to the water in my clothes and go right in.

I'm swimming only until I get to water depth about twice my height when I notice a small body just sitting at the bottom of the section of ocean. I can somehow tell it's not a zombie, but instead a small boy of maybe 8 years, and I swim down to pull him up and out of the ocean. Once I get him out I run to take him over to a building side and start trying to do anything I can to get water out of his system, yelling "Are you ok?" He swats away my hand and simply replies, "I'm fine." It gets awkward and silent for what seems like an eternity and I ask what he was doing at the bottom of the ocean. This look that gives me chills passes his face, and replies, "You'll find the answers you seek on the dark face of the moon." The kid then looks like he's about to try to eat my face and I scream, but instead his body becomes translucent and he absorbs into me. As he does a million different images of the future pass through my head, though I do not know if they're different moments down the same timeline, or a million different possibilities for the future that our timeline could progress down.

Thoroughly freaked out, I go inside to try to find something to eat. My friend is there in the kitchen with a female just a bit older than me and she's cooking for the group. She hands us both another, much sharper knife and explains exactly how to strike a zombie to minimize damage so that we can filet it better and cook it up (not only do zombies apparently come through the tunnel every now and then, but they are available to eat). Just as she says this, a couple actually appear from the catacombs and we follow her instructions to kill them clean. Just as we're dragging the bodies towards her, a few more come up and we do the same thing. She remarks how odd it is, as only a couple at the most tend to come up a day. Another body appears from the tunnel, but the results are much different this time. While the person looks like another zombie and is even partially decayed, it behaved like a human. It ducked around our strikes and grabbed the knife from my friend before lancing it through his throat. As my friend is collapsing to the ground, the creature runs back to the tunnel and somehow destroys the narrow opening, so now it's a large, sloping gap for a horde of zombies to come up. Most are normal, but there are quite a few who look like chargers from Left 4 Dead, as well as a couple that look like tanks from this game.

The female and I both try to run back out, but I'm the only one who actually leaves. I start screaming for everyone to get out and to run just before the horde comes out behind me. Many people aren't fast enough and become lunch for the group of zombies. A large creature of our own appears, seeming to me like an almost mini-Godzilla but with wings. It scoops up a couple of people and prepares to take flight. I just about get grabbed by a zombie, but a woman pushes me out of the way and screams when the zombie bites her in the throat. When the Godzilla creature grabs me to take with it, the woman gurgles out, "You've seen the future and you'll be the one to save us all." As the creature takes flight and takes us with it, my dream ends.

What I can remember of the dream starts off with me talking to my boyfriend. We're in our apartment and we're talking about moving somewhere together, but I tell him that I have a job that I have to go do first. I have to go to a different city and investigate some strange disappearances where none of the locals can figure out what's happening. I walk over to my laptop at this point to check my email, as I at some point earlier had emailed the mayor of the city I was checking out to try to make accommodations for living arrangements. I noticed the mayor had messaged back and I was stressed out to realize that it was my ex, and the message he wrote was this:

Hello [Name],

You know you're always welcome here. I have made arrangements for you to stay in the best place I could grab for your temporary visit. You know I look forward to seeing you.

It made me a little antsy and my boyfriend even more so in my dream, but I told him that he knew I had work to do, so go I must. There's a brief period where I'm packing up my things, and then the dream skips.

It now goes to my ex and some other man at the city. It almost seems like old-timey western, but with a high flair of Victorian steampunk. The second guy present is rather lanky and tall, and everything about him is dark. He's dressed in all black and with a bearded face, dark hair, and the only thing bright about him are his green eyes. It's night outside, and him and my ex are standing just outside a fenced area and just inside is a baby elephant. It's walking around inside as the two men talk. They discuss my coming to town, and the stranger looks very happy while my ex does not.

"You don't have to do this," my ex says as he watches the little elephant graze around inside the fences. The other man just laughs and keeps his gaze ahead as well, "Except I do have to, she stands in the way of my future plans." Not long after the man speaks, a small area of earth crumbles in on itself just behind the elephant's back feet, and it cries out as part of it slides in. It recoveries briefly and prepares to pull itself out, but it cries out again as something seems to grab onto it and drag it inside the hole. The cries of terror quickly die out and are instead replaced with low squelches and gurgles. The two of them stand there a little longer after the sounds die out before the stranger says, "And this will help me take care of the problem."

It then goes to me once more, perhaps the next night, getting settled in my temporary place in my pajamas, and for some reason I have brought my dog Chad with me. I am putting away some of my stuff when I find a note in one of the drawers in the bedroom. It's from my ex, and it's warning me that someone is trying to kill me and that I should check for something I didn't pack and hide soon. I don't see anything unusual in my bags, so I go looking through drawers until I find what seems like a large slab of raw meat, and it completely reeks. Who knew how long it had been in there! I was going to simply remove it and disregard the message when I heard and felt a low rumbling in the floor near me. Extremely frightened, I grab my dog by the collar and run to the bathroom that's interconnected to my bedroom. I shut the door quickly and sit on the floor with my pet, my arms wrapped around him and my heart beating through my chest.

The loud crack of large wood splitting comes from the room and I wake up just as I actually see the shadow of some large creature from the crack underneath the door.

Amount of time slept: 2 hours

What I recall in this dream is me waking up in some sort of institutional-type building. However, the setup is very strange to me. The floor beneath me is ceramic tiling, and the walls behind me and to my front and right are solid white. However, to my left the wall seems to actually be made from link fence material, so that I can see through it. Getting up and peering through the 'wall', I notice that the building appears almost like a spiral staircase so that I can see the levels both below me and above me, and I also see that on the other side of my current level is a door, presumably leading to the stairwell. I run over and exit where I'm at through this door.

I'm shocked, however, when I enter to smell something rancid and to see a half-decomposed body resting on the stairwell leading up to the upper level. Upon hearing the noise of the door clambering shut behind me, the corpse actually rouses and groans before attempting to crawl in my direction. I immediately recognize it to be a zombie and sprint down the stairs. I try exiting through a lower door about three or four levels down, but this floor is slam packed full of zombies and I barely manage to bring the door back to a close before they can stick a limb through the opening. It has to be pulled for the door to open, so I appear to be relatively safe.

Still, I can hear moans all throughout the stairwell, so I know I have to get out. Suddenly a pole seems to be directly in the center of the also spiraling staircase (much like a firefighter's pole) so I hop the stair railing and take the metal pole all the way down to the bottom. I pass many zombies along the way, but seem to come out lucky as there aren't any on the bottom floor when I reach it. Now there is actually another door set off to the left that doesn't appear to re-enter the building and I go through it.

Where I appear next seems like the food court setup of a mall, though nothing is running and no people are there. It's also devoid of any tables, chairs, or things of that nature, and is mostly an empty expanse of concrete flooring other than the long-empty food vendors. On the far side I notice a still-running escalator leading down to a bottom floor and I get on it. It takes me to another door, but before I go through I look to my right to see a long, vertical window to the actual outside. It seems the building I've been in is located in a desert-area, as there are many sand dunes and cacti throughout the orange land. There seem to be zombie sparsely located, but not enough to concern me at that moment. So I ignore them and finally go through the door.

When I enter the feel to me to seemed to be set up much like a GameStop (or your typical more high-end gaming store). Instead of having a ton of games on sell, however, they had a bunch of older arcade games set up along the middle of the store, and the edges were actually stands of comics, manga, and other video game or television related items. On my right wall are four highly tinted doors leading to the outside. This time there are actually people inhabiting the store. There are some my age, but mostly some older than me. I actually recognize one of the people my age as my friend, Chris, and we're very happy to see each other. He explains that no one had known where I'd gone when everything went down, but that he and the people there had been living off food from the food court up until that point. However, he said everyone knew they were getting low on resources, so they actually had a plan on the roof of the part of the building they were in (apparently the door was out located near the food court to this machine) so that they could go search for more food.

About that time, everything begins to go even more downhill. Somehow zombies have managed to venture their way into the area I'm in from the outside, and the scene quickly becomes bloody and gruesome. People are being shred apart by the monsters as Chris grabs my hand and takes me back through the door and up the escalators to the food court.

[On a side note here, my dream randomly jumps to these two teenage boys running through a hospital room being chased by zombies. One of them has a sword and stops to start attacking their chasers and ultimately ends up sacrificing himself for the younger boy. Just as he's being overwhelmed, however, he gets to see the other boy open the door leading out and still be consumed by zombies residing just outside. Neither of them live through it.]

Chris and I make it to the building's roof, where it turns out the machine is actually a helicopter, not a plane. Neither of us have driven it before, but Chris designates me to try driving it. We hastily hop inside and I start pressing buttons in an attempt to make it work. Somehow I actually get the thing started and us lifted off, but just as we're leaving the building and screams behind us in exchange for hundreds of sand dunes, a problem quickly surfaces. The helicopter has actually been low on gas and the console urgently starts beeping at me. In my dream it almost immediately shuts down, sending us crashing back down to the ground. It all goes a bit blurry from here as I black out, and the next time I wake up is to Chris screaming. In our landing I managed to rip off the door from his side and crashed so that we were laying sideways with my side at the bottom and his at the top, and zombies are clawing inside and attacking Chris, though not quite able to drag him out. However, I know that they are still tearing at him and dread fills me at the oncoming change of my friend, but this is the point at which I wake up.

So when I first recall the dream, I am with a group of my friends about to enter into a house. It looks perfectly normal on the outside: a standard, middle-class American house, painted a medium blue in color and two stories. I am unsure why we are going inside, but I am with my friends so I follow them on in.

Coming inside I find us in what seems to be an exceptionally long hallway with only the way we came in and another door that continues on into the home. My friends quickly run through the next door, leaving me behind. Running to catch up with them, I'm surprised to find that when I follow through the door they are no where in the room, and I come upon a kitchen. It's completely void of life and when I holler for my friends I get no response. Concerned, I turn back around and go back through the door that I had just entered through.

However, to my dismay, I am not back in the hallway. Now I'm in a bathroom and there is a girl sitting on top of the toilet cover, a laptop in her lap as she steadily types away. I'm highly confused at this point and attempt to speak with her, asking her where my friends are, but she seems to blatantly ignore me and continues typing on her keyboard. I leave her to go through the door I entered once more and find myself in yet another room. I am steadily freaking out at this point, quickly running through doors and rooms to try to find my friends and get myself out of that house. Occasionally I come across people but they act as if I do not exist at all and ignore any interaction.

I run quickly through as many doors as I can, and I finally come across a door that looks different, this one painted entirely black as opposed to the plain wooden doors that made up all the others. I reach for the knob and slowly open the door. Just as I open it all the way, an external force in reality awakens me and draws me from the dream.

So the dream started off normal and very ordinary. I was originally at what seemed to be a lecture hall of sorts filled with about fifty people or so. I was here with one of my convention friends, he and I simply sitting there chatting about non-important things.

Suddenly the situation begins to escalate quickly. Another girl that I vaguely knew suddenly came into the room and grabbed the hand of my friend, quickly muttering something about "needing to get out now." Not explaining anything to me, she and the other occupants of the room began exiting in a chaos almost, leaving me as the last to exit.

When I left the room the environment was absolutely different from what I expected. It suddenly appeared as a very old country town, with the majority of the homes being made of logs and old, antique wood. The first person I came across had a very demonic aura to her, and was not a face that I could fathom or recognize. Coming quickly up to me she tried grabbing at me with clawed fingers but I ran away screaming from her.

As it turns out, there was a group of these evil beings that seemed out to kill me. No matter how hard I kept hiding in different spots they kept showing up to claw at me and trying to murder me. Eventually I hid under a sort of gap between a porch and the ground, thinking I was safe. I hid here for an excruciatingly long time before another of those faces appeared before me. Realizing where I was the other creature/humanoids began circling the awning, keeping me trapped underneath. It seemed like what appeared to be a bulldozer of some sorts came up, crashing into the house and destroying the foundations. As the house started falling down upon me, I woke up from the dream.

I don't know how the zombie apocalypse starts in my dream. When I enter, the pandemic has already begun and where I am at there seems to be nobody around. I walk through what seems to be a large, courtyard type area outside of a medium sized cottage house. I enter the house through some French doors and flip on some lights. I had entered what seemed to be the kitchen area, though it's rather small. When I switch on the lights, I all of a sudden can see zombies meandering around the courtyard exactly where I had been only a moment before. However, they don't seem to take any care in the fact that I am drawing attention to myself. I then go to the stove and pick up a frying pan that I intend to use as a weapon.

I look out the French doors from where I just came and notice a large pipe about waist high going through what all of a sudden appears to be a extremely thick brick wall starting at the side of the cottage. Inside of the pipe is a boy who I seem to recognize, but I can't place who it is. Standing directly in front of the pipe with its back to the boy is another zombie. I can, however, tell that he's pleading for help so I begin to knock loudly on the windows farther away to draw all of the zombie's attentions. Suddenly alert to my presence, they all swarm to the area where I am knocking and begin to moan and claw at the glass. That is, all except the zombie standing in front of the boy. It stays oblivious until the boy finally decides to retreat into the pipe. Finally this particular zombie seems to take notice of movement and follows the boy into the pipe. Since the zombies are enthralled with where I was knocking on the glass, I decide to go try to help him and follow through the same pipe.

When I come out on the other side, it seems like we're in something similar to a darkly colored prison hall in aura. The entire hall is made of a dark steel. I immediately see the boy and the zombie wrestling with each other and I grip my skillet to get ready to help. The next thing I hear is the boy yelling at the zombie, "No! Don't bite me! Don't bite me!" A cold dread washed over me and I slowly shuffled around the fray and took off running down the hall, leaving the boy behind me. A guilt fills me as I hear him call after me, "No! Don't leave me behind! You'll regret this!"

Somehow I end up entering what seems to be a larger metal room filled with survivors. What's even more weird than coincidentally coming upon this group is that the boy I just left behind is sitting in the corner of the room with blood running down his arm. It seems that he was telling the story of his almost-escape from the disaster when he turns to speak to me, "I didn't get bitten by the zombie you saw me fighting. After I finally crushed his skull, I was attacked by another zombie that had found me. I could've been saved if you had been there." Almost as soon as he says these last words to me, I wake up.