12.02.03
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the weirdness that is my nocturnal subconscious

I have these weird cinematic dreams sometimes—totally fictional realism, places and people and situations that I recognize from things I have seen, but reconstructed in a way that is just... random. And funny. Some actually have discernable plot, and one of the hallmarks of these vivid imaginings is their ability to continue after waking. Not in a psychotic 'I see fantastical things' sort of way, but in the way that if I woke up before the dream was complete, it repeats itself or continues from a recognizable point the next time I sleep. These dreams are also very clear, so much so that once I've finished dreaming it, I can usually sit and over the course of a few nights, write out the saga. The blank spots seem to fill themselves in, whether it's because I know what happened somewhere or it's easy for me to complete my own fiction, I'm not certain.

Particular dreams are familiar like old friends. Some were at first mildly terrifying— like the one where my Dad gets eaten by the Gremlins. Once I learned to love horror movies, though, they stopped being scary. I do so enjoy waking up to a bit of adrenaline, the assembling together of the fiction my mind has created, separating it from the real world foggily. Even better is the part where you get to sleep again, snuggled under the heavy warm covers, and pick up where you left off before, find out what happens in the end.

If it has an end... some don't. The most confusing and persistant of these dreams is the Sprawling House dream. It's a maze-world I created out of pieces of every place I've ever lived, constantly adding new space and rearranging the old. It is very plain to me—even now, awake—which pieces lead to other places, how it connects. I have it drawn, on a sheet of big art paper, transferred into the computer, because it fascinates me so. In addition to my own home history, it includes pieces of other places I recognize. The red-curtained room from Twin Peaks, the hospital corridors from Parasite Eve, a nighttime street from my college hometown, a friend's grandfather's farm. All interesting, powerful places, for one reason or another. I suppose it is not too surprising to imagine with scenery like this that Sprawling House is a Chase dream—an anxiety dream, in professional's terms. It is but it isn't. Sometimes other things are happening there too. It's the most plot-light of them all.

I've had several slight variations on what I think of as The High Rise Hotel Dream (HRHD), a really really fun one. In it, I'm with a group of my friends from college (and a dog with a bazooka strapped to its back) and we're trying to fend off the apocalypse, all the while having a madcap city adventure in and around this huge high-rise hotel. It's a very complicated dream, and large portions of it are somewhat incomprehensible, but it's hardly scary at all. In fact, I say with fair certainty that if the apocalypse comes, it could be kinda fun to hang out with my pals as the world ends.

This new dream that I'm about to narrate—the Zombie Dream—is a little different. It's much more camp and much less "I've been trying to read Pynchon again." And a lot of it probably has to do with the recent spate of zombie movies and books that have been around our house. And 24—the producer in this dream world is quite obviously Mark Snow.

Suburbia.

I live with two other people in a rented house in a nice part of town—we'll call them a. and b. We're all young professionals, with time to garden and play expensive video games. Our neighbors are much the same, though a few have children. We have no children. Our house is comfortable and well-appointed, lots of geeky toys and electronics. On a dreary weekend, we can often be found—as we were on this one—holed up in our home computer lab, playing networked RPGs and drinking beer, simply hanging out together, watching TV and talking while we play.

On this occasion, we had run out of beer. a., the male roommate (and b.'s boyfriend), had volunteered to go pick it up at a nearby convenience store, leaving b. and I home alone. After he left, she and I had returned to our games, and, after a few minutes, one of us noticed what was on the television.

It hadn't really registered earlier what we were watching. The Sci-Fi channel is one of our favorites, and it's not at all unusual for horror movies to be playing. We keep a stack of them on the bookshelf, just to run in the background as we work. So the staccato, terse reports, the pictures of riots and firey craziness, sounded like something out of a second-rate scare flick. 'Oh, look, zombies on the White House lawn.' Yawn.

I don't know who noticed first. "What channel is that on?" or "What movie is playing?" and then we both had the sudden chilling realization that the channel was coming through as CNN and ohmygod that's one of their serious news reporters sitting there with stitches in her head, reading off a white typed piece of paper as though she was doing so at gunpoint. It was a very weird sensation. Immediately, one of us turned to a computer and fired up Google News. The other flipped channels. Many were there, all with news reports and scrolling text, but what frightened us more than that were the channels that weren't there. The downtown Chicago channel. The one from New York. MTV.

Scared to death, we read everything we could find. Most of the reports were from smaller cities, newspaper subsidiaries. The major news outlets were strangely silent, but as we read on that made more sense. The infection had started in the major cities and spread outward. The disease was extremely contagious, so much so that all city infrastructure (traffic, medical centers, police agencies, government offices) was paralyzed as entire workforces fell ill.

Some were fleeing the cities, but frighteningly few, and with them too were coming infected. Some officials recommended fleeing with them; others said to board up your houses and retreat to safe inside rooms to wait out the plague. Noone seemed to really know what to do, aside from panicking.

And panic we did. I don't know if it was the news reports, or the realization that a. was out there, somewhere, and could be infected or come home infected. Maybe it was the quickly-occurring thought that our house didn't have a proper 'safe room' with a single point of entry—it was built on a hill and even the basement had windows and a door to the outside.

We ran to check the front window, to look for any sign of a. There was none, his car was still gone. We checked all the doors, locked all the windows and pulled the shades, and went back up to the lab to read news. We read. We paced. We ran downstairs a few times for false alarms, but not too much later, we heard the familiar sound of a.'s car pulling up. We peeked out and saw him park, so we ran to the foyer and threw open the front door, hollering at him to get inside.

As we screamed (and to our horror) we saw the little boy across the street walking slowly in a.'s direction. We could not hear him, but his lips were moving; he must have been saying something to a., who had turned to look at him, puzzled by us yelling and the kid's approach. We shouted more and more frantically as the boy got closer, and a. finally did figure something was up and turn to run, but by then it was too late. The family from next door were also lurching towards him: a 40-ish wife and husband and their two kids, around 12 and 16. They've blocked off his escape route, and he looks confusedly between them and the boy from across the street who is now reaching out to touch him. His expression changes dramatically as the kid makes contact: his body jerks, his mouth flaps open, he bends in half at the waist, doubled over by whatever they have done to him. We're still screaming, watching, too afraid to run out to him.

He stands upright again suddenly, as though drawn upward by a string, and we know he's been infected. His skin is peeling back, white and pale with bruise-purple lines running underneath. His eyes are crimson and wet, with blood running down his cheeks and onto his shirt. His clothes have somehow gotten instantly dirtier and shabbier and his expression is slack and lifeless. There is a general mumbling going on between our zombie neighbors and our newly-zombified roommate, and they all begin to shuffle towards our front door. Which is still standing wide open, with us hanging out onto the porch, eyes agog with shock and fear.

We turn and, thankfully, manage to run inside, slamming the deadbolt home. "Windows!" b. screams, we realize the door won't protect us much, not with the huge picture windows looking out onto the front porch and garden. Grunting, we flip over the couch and shove it against the larger pair; the loveseat we wedged in the foyer, pressed against the door and window both. And we flee upstairs to a bedroom closet, and the household safe, where we keep the guns.

Yep, you heard right: the guns. In the dream world our place is equipped with an impressive cache of very advanced firearms in a gigantic reinforced safe. b. and I head for the secret panel in the back of a closet and wrench open the metal door. We grab the weapons we want (apparently my dream self wants a shotgun) and run back towards the stairs. We hear them as we hit the doorway, hear the glass breaking in the windows, the scraping and splintering of wood.

We scream some more as they make it inside. Contrary to popular belief, the zombie-a. has no trouble spotting us, nor ambling up the stairs. Making the turn on the landing slows him up a slight bit, but we're still standing, frozen, at the top. b. regains her voice, screaming shrilly at me, "Shoot him! Shoot him! For gods' sakes, SHOOT HIM!" She has a curtain rod in her hand—a curtain rod that, incidentally, is leaned up against the wall in her bedroom in the real world, an oddly frivilous little detail to recall. She whacks him with it, because I'm too slow in raising my gun. I raise it as he falls, but don't pull the trigger. He's back down at the bottom of the stairs, and I say to a., "Are you sure you want me to do this? It's your husband!" She screams that she's positive it's NOT a. anymore and I let the zombie-a. have both barrels. Without reloading (dream. zombies. deal.), I hit him again and he's pretty much disentegrated by the blast, a pile of zombie-bits on the landing.

The neighbors' kids had managed to worm their way inside just after a. The shrapnel and buckshot spray from the blasts had cut them down as well. The ceiling light fixture in the foyer cast a weird, uneven orangeish shadow from the blood sprayed across it. The couch was sliding back in puddles of blood on the floor as the neighbors pushed it back from the door and stepped over their fallen children. They didn't seem to notice them.

Again without reloading I fired down the stairwell, taking out the neighbors, but leaving a pile of bodies blocking our way. b., much to my amazement, took two or three giant steps down the stairs and turned, exceptionally gracefully, and vaulted over the railing and down to the main level of the house. She landed in slo-mo, turning to train her gaze on the pile of bodies, and called to me to follow. I used my own newly-noticed ninja abilities to leap the railing and land beside her. We both started as the bottom half of the father twitched and fell towards us. b. grabbed my hand and pulled me in the opposite direction, through the dining room and into the kitchen.

We paused, briefly, and looked out the garage door. More zombies were coming up the driveway. We looked at one another, and to the basement door, then plunged down the basement stairs. We ran through my bedroom, through my sitting room. I grabbed a bookbag, some rope, a flashlight. Shoes. Water. We had all these things, conveniently nearby.

Then we walked through the door and outside, onto the streets of Baltimore.

Baltimore

Yes, I know—my house isn't in Baltimore. Like the Sprawling House dream, this one includes a spatial shift or two, and this is the first one. My basement door really opens onto a overgrown backyard in a suburban neighborhood with a privacy fence and some intricate redwood decking. However, in the world that is this dream, the basement door opens onto the wharf downtown of the only city in Maryland I've spent some time in.

It's the main street, with its tree-lined and brick-paved pavillion, the cement pillars lining the edge of the water, the stones with the names etched in them. It's after dark and the moon is behind hazy clouds so it's very hard to see. There are small clumps of people moving about in the shadows, but you can only barely make them out even if you're right up close, so at first we're very afraid to risk it. It seems like the other people are doing the same since no one approaches us for quite a while.

We pass the really good chinese restaurant, and then coffeehouses, and the food stands that are hanging open, but empty. One of them has caught fire and the smell and smoke of burning oil is hanging heavily in the air. We're looking for a police station, a shelter, but every place we pass looks abandoned, ransacked. We still kind of hope that there are people—not zombified people—around, but each time we get up the nerve to approach someone, they turn and we see their weeping flesh, exposed bone. And then we have to run, panting and gasping, until we can lose them again. After the first few encounters, we stop approaching others we see on the street at all, instead choosing to hide as quickly as possible until they pass.

We dart into a little restaurant to evade some staggering infected. It's quiet in there, and the front door has bars. It's an Italian place, obviously family-owned, from the framed, dusty photographs behind the register and the worn but carefully hand-made white-and-red-checkered tablecloths. We scour the premises, and make a rather grisly discovery in the kitchen. In the pantry we find a man, probably the owner by the way he was dressed, who is very, very dead. Not The Living Dead™, just... dead. He is sprawled on the floor, a bloody gunshot wound to his head, a pistol nearby... suicide? It didn't seem too surprising.

The surprise was discovering the others, obviously infected, dead and bagged in the freezer. In many, many gallon-size Ziploc™ bags. We put these gruesome findings together and surmised that he had likely murdered his zombified family—wife, kids, possibly the wait staff by the number of heads—and then dismembered them, fearing they would regenerate. He then stored the parts in the deep freeze—separately of course, something the fools in horror movies never think to do.

We shut and locked the freezer, after dragging the suicide victim inside. We take his gun, a revolver of some kind. It didn't really make any difference, but it made us feel better to have the dead people locked up behind that solid-looking door. Plus he was beginning to smell something awful, and it would only get worse. At least the freezer door sealed tight. But even with all that, the place seemed like a good place to hide out for a little while, maybe get some rest. It was dim and the windows were small, and there were only 2 points of entry.

We pushed one of the booths in front of the front door, moved a kitchen table in front of the fire exit. We pulled the shades. After pacing nervously for a few minutes, we settled down and realized we were starving. We raided the dry stock shelves for food and supplies, found and took whatever useful items we could, piling them on a table to pack up later.

The wood-fired oven and the gas stove allowed us to make a real dinner. We cooked some canned tomatoes into sauce, found some dry pasta. There was cheese (cured parmesean) and flour and yeast for bread and dough. We almost relaxed: the bread was in the oven, the sauce was simmering, the water beginning to steam on its way to boiling. We were discussing whether to open a bottle of red or white. The place felt safe and cozy, and from the heat of the oven, warm.

We decided later that that was probably our mistake—the oven. The smoke, the warmth, maybe the light or the smell of food cooking attracted them. The one thing you don't want to hear from anyone in the midst of a zombie uprising: 'Did you hear that?'

We both heard it. The sounds of scraping, mumbling... then the unmistakable pounding on the door. We commence with the screaming (Yes, I know there's a lot of screaming here, but that's the way it happened. Guess in this world, my roommate and I both girly-girls, at least in the yelling department.) and the scrambling, and the turning over of the pots and pans. The boiling sauce splatters across the floor, but we ignore it. The wine glasses shatter as they fall from our hands. The sounds are only coming from the front so we sprint to the back. We grab our bags—only the original ones we had, we hadn't finished packing up the supplies. We do manage to get the guns, though. We throw our stuff down by the door and start moving the stuff we'd piled against it away. We throw things haphazardly, not caring where they land or what they break. Finally the door is clear and we grab our bags and weapons. b. checks out the window while I listen close at the door. We don't hear anything, but we can see the door at the front beginning to splinter. Eventually the mob outside (we can hear the steady murmur becoming a dull roar) will push through, and we don't want to be there when that happens.

We look at each other apprehensively, then crack open the door. Outside is still, calm, quiet. An eerie grey light filters into a long, thin alleyway, neither end visible from where we stand. The porch is industrial steel; dumpsters in the same dull shade line the stone walls. There are three steps down, splattered with sticky stains and stuck pieces of paper. We step out onto the small porch and look both ways, trying to see what's beyond us: nothing. We shut the door behind us, and an iron bar drops in place on the inside. We have to pick a direction, and we choose to go away from the front door of the restaurant, thus avoiding the mob scene.

The alleyway stretches in front of us endlessly. Not in the metaphorical sense, but in the very real this-road-has-no-end way. We start out running, then slow to a jog, and eventually stop hustling alltogether and walk wearily instead. We didn't get to sleep, or rest, or even eat the dinner we had been making, and now we were walking through the same grey hallway with grey floors and grey walls and grey metal porches with the diamonds on them... and door after door that won't open, no matter how much we shoved at it.

So we kept walking. We walked until we were exhausted, and then kept walking until we were past that point and into delirious. There was nowhere to stop, no where to hide -- nothing in this insufferably long alleyway besides us, our stuff, and the same stupid grey dumpster, over and over again. Eventually we began to despair that we would never escape this place, and dropped some of our heavier burdens. We weren't sure if we were hallucinating or not when we came upon them again a half an hour later. At that point, we decided to stop, since we were literally getting no where. Because of the lack of alternatives, we chose the dumpster as our resting place, and crawled inside, tying down the latch with string and wire that we found in the refuse.

It smelled bad—though not as bad as the dead people—but we were so tired from being scared that we fell right asleep.

And in these dreams, often, when I fall asleep, in the real world, I wake up. Usually it happens like an intermission.. maybe I need to pee or get a glass or water, so the dream works it in. Here I woke up a bit, got something to drink, thought to myself "damn, I'd really like to know how we get out of this one" and laid back down. Within minutes (it felt like), I was right back in the alley. But it was morning.

We woke up in the garbage, stinky and hot. It was sweltering in there, the tied-down lid not letting a breath of fresh air get inside. Not like there had been a breeze in that hallway; it was completely still and dank. It takes a while to untie the knots we'd made, and we're cranky and shaky as we go about it. Finally we get the top open and it's the sweetest sight we've ever seen. Not only is there a breeze blowing, but the air is cool and only faintly smells of decomposing fish (this, for Baltimore, is an excellent air quality day). Back in the direction I thought we had come from, we can see the tree-lined street that the pasta shop was on. We grab our stuff and climb out of the trash, picking bits of food and dirt from our incredibly filthy clothes. We walk quite quickly for the alley entrance, neither of us looking away from it lest it vanish again. We come back out onto the very same street in Baltimore, only in the daytime and deserted instead of populated with a zombie mob.

b. pulls at my shirt-sleeve and points off down the street. Far in the distance, I can see a winking blue light—a police car. It hadn't been there the night before (in the dark we would have seen it), so someone must have driven in. We began walking in that direction, debating whether or not these creatures could operate a motor vehicle. We didn't think so, as they seemed rather single-minded: brains, brains, and brains. But then again, we didn't think they could climb stairs either, and zombie-a. sure had no problems getting up ours.

With few other options, we walked in the direction of the cruiser, probably 10 or 15 blocks away. As we got closer, we saw a cop leaning against the front quarter-panel, his back to us. He seemed to be talking on his radio, nodding a bit now and again. We surreptitiously whispered to one another and decided that if he was on the radio, he was probably still good, and the best shot we had to get somewhere where there were lots of other people that we could outrun.

We walked slowly closer, the car between him and us. b. called out to him, 'Hello, Officer?' or something, and he turned around. At about the same time, I saw movement out of the corner of my eyes. Plural. Because we were at the intersection of the street and two alleyways, and what we hadn't noticed as we were walking forward were the gangs of obviously undead standing, waiting, in the wings. The thing in the police uniform turned around and his hat tipped forward on his bobbing head. He wasn't talking on the radio, he was gumming its broken plastic bits, sort of gnawing at it as it hummed and crackled. Great wads of drool, speckled with blood, grey matter and flesh, dripped from his chin and onto his scuffed and scarred patent leather shoes.

"Holy FUCK!" I said. "Fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK."

And then, "RUN!". We hauled ass back the way we came.

We fled back towards the restaurant, towards the harbor. Going further into the city didn't seem like such a good idea, and we knew at least a handful of blocks behind us were virtually deserted. We sped back through them, panic keeping us a good distance ahead of the latest mob.

We passed the restaurant and the food stands, and the row of little shops. We could see the pier off to one side, the docks with their listing ships. We crossed over the brick and into the cobblestones, running over the ones engraved with people's names, people who probably were dead or worse. b. grabbed my hand and almost jerked me off my feet, veering sharply to the right. She pointed ahead of her, "There! The dock parking lot!" I'm not sure what she means, but she has an idea and I don't, so I follow. We race to the lot, fluidly vaulting the chainlink fence and ducking under the gate-arm. b. screeches to a halt in front of a beat up Ford Escort. She grabs a hairpin, jimmies the lock. She unlocks the passenger side. "Get in!"

I hop in the car, momentarily mystified by my roommate's carjacking talents. As she drops beneath the steering column, she reminds me that this car is the same make as her old junker, and that she used to work on it (She doesn't really, at least not as far as I know... though she did own a Ford Escort.). She rips off the plastic cover and yanks apart dangling wires. Her hands are shaking and she asks me to look out the window, check on our pursuers. They're close—at the fence, pushing against it with their collective weight, the posts beginning to pull free from the ground, the mesh buckling. b. curses as the wires spark, but the engine doesn't turn. She tries different wires. The zombies have made it across, kind of trampling over each other, and they stagger towards the entrance. The bump into the gate and stumble on the curb, but continue coming. The fourth combination of wires sparks again, and we hear a faint rumble under the hood. The zombies are only a few feet away now, and I scramble to lock the doors, front and back, driver and passenger. b. pushes the wires together again and the starter grinds. Again and it turns over. Again. The zombies are touching the bumper now, touching the car, beginning to scrabble against the doors and windows. The engine turns over and roars to life. It's a wonder b. doesn't flood the engine when she slams on the gas (after throwing it into reverse), but the car leaps backwards and we hear the ripe thump of bodies against bumper. We peel out of our spot and head for the far entrance. The path to the one we ran through is thick with undead, so b. guns it in the opposite direction and we escape the lot.

The gas tank is 3/4 full and we just want to get out of there, out of the city. We speed as much as we can (showing some restraint to avoid stopped cars or other blockades), and are soon at the city limits. We don't know where we're going, but driving is safer than hanging out somewhere, at least until we run out of gas. So we move on.

And then my alarm clock went off. Never fear, the dream continued, but this is where I absolutely HAD to wake up to get to work. I thought about the dream off and on all day, began to write a rough outline before I forgot the really amusing details. I read over what I had written the next night before I laid back down, hoping I could cajole my subconscious into completing the adventure. I must have been convincing, because when I settled in, it picked back up. It wasn't exactly where it left off—in fact quite a bit of time had passed. But it was rather like a screen wipe in a movie, a montage. I knew what had happened, and it wasn't much of anything that progressed the plot. We had driven for a really long time. Long enough to no longer be on the Eastern seaboard, but in much flatter places.

the Midwest / Flatlands

We had found abandoned gas stations that still held gasoline, food, water, supplies. We had on gas station clothes—t-shirts with wacky sayings, trucker hats that advertised really small towns in really obscure places. Tons of chips, canned food, and bottled water in the backseat. A few wrappers scattered about the floorboards, some cardboard, some tape. We were grimy and weary. Sometimes b. slept while I drove, and then we traded places. We stopped when we could, always terrified we'd run across a bunch of them, a colony, but mostly these places were abandoned. Occasionally we'd find bodies or damaged stuff, but we stayed far away from major cities, taking major highways around them if they were open. If we even thought we heard something, or felt uncomfortable, we moved on immediately. A few times we stayed put long enough to shower at the restroom sink, or heat some food with canned fuel or a generator, but mostly we moved around, chasing radio stations.

We wanted to know what was happening and our best connection was through the few radio broadcasts that had continued. There weren't many, and their signals faded in and out. After the first few months, we would sometimes go days without hearing a single one. There seemed to be more active stations the further we went west and since we preferred the flat, open areas anyway, that was where we stayed. We could get out and stretch our legs, together, in the plains. We'd drive to the highest ground, where we could see all around, and stop and look over the desolte grounds. In all our driving, we did not see other cars or any other people. It was as though the entire earth's population had vanished, save for ourselves.

The stations dwindled until there was only one, a tinny faraway-sounding channel that didn't really carry news or civilian reports. It seemed more like a military station, with clipped obtuse messages and regular field reports. If the weather was bad or the sky the least bit cloudy, the station would dimish into little more than a buzz of unruly static.

We drove around, carefully trying to trace the origin of the radio broadcast. Once we could hear clearly regardless of the weather, we started looking for a place to hunker down for a bit. We just didn't think we could stand another day trapped in the tiny vehicle, which by now was decidedly rank with grime and use. And though we had been hearing the official-sounding broadcast off and on for a few weeks, it had never been clear enough we could really discern its content. We were hoping, perhaps, for direction, and we thought we might need to be sitting still to write it down.

Gas Station Nirvana

Almost like a mirage, a gas station with a red peaked roof that swooped down to form pointed canopies for rows of gas pumps appeared in the distance. It looked almost like one of the diners attached to a HoJo, only sharper and more... white. As we got closer we noticed it was actually several buildings, connected by these jutting crimson roofs. We carefully pulled to the pumps and gassed up the car, making sure to park it pointing towards the road, ready to go at any second. We decided to go from room to room together, as the place offered plenty of hiding places. We started in the convenience store, getting fresh sodas for ourselves. They weren't cold, but they were still quite good.

The store we checked first; it had huge plate glass windows and, from the outside, appeared clear and well-lit. Once inside, we were pleased to discover a small travel goods section: backpacks, combs, toothbrushes, and, oddly enough, camping and hunting supplies. In the back there was a small cluster of offices, and an obvious breakroom with a water cooler and coffee maker. There were no bodies, nor was any of the merchandise scattered or tossed about.

to be continued...

Gas Station Nirvana
Getting Our Education
Military Men


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